Academy Street by Mary Costello is a sweeping and deeply moving story, a short book that spans decades, taking us from 1940s rural Ireland to 21st century New York. When we meet Tess first, her childlike voice relays her confused feelings and observations of those around her as she copes with the death of her mother, and begins to withdraw. As a young woman she moves to Dublin to work as a trainee nurse, where social anxiety leads her to take the night shifts as a way of minimising any social interaction required with colleagues or patients. Later still, she moves to New York to live with an aunt, where the hope for a fresh start hovers. Over the years, she experiences love, loss, new life, family tragedy, driftings and returns. 

There is a softness, a gentleness to the prose that lends it a hazy, dreamlike quality and yet Tess is a person who feels so deeply and intensely, experiencing desire, loneliness, anxiety and a deep longing, a craving, for a connection that somehow always seems just out of reach. Costello’s writing beautifully captures fleeting moments of ecstasy, of happiness, of sorrow and of deep pain, while she also shows great skill in capturing the small intimate observations of everyday life; the small details of someone’s hair or skin, the way the light falls in a room. 

Family is all important to Tess – she says at one point she feels she could live anywhere as long as she has kin near her, and has a particularly close bond with her sister Clare – but families are never easy, with quiet judgements made and bonds lost. There is something about this book, so small yet so expansive in its scope that, that speaks to the transience of life, and the human need to both understand ourselves, and be understood by others, in this short time we have. Loved this, and glad to have Mary Costello’s short story collection Barcelona lined up to read soon. 

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Academy Street was published by Canongate in 2014.

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Mary Costello lives in Galway. Her short story collection, The China Factory (2012), was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award and shortlisted for an Irish Book Award. Her first novel, Academy Street (2014), won the Irish Novel of the Year Award at the Irish Book Awards and was named overall Irish Book of the Year. It was serialised on BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, the Costa First Novel Prize, the EU Prize for Literature and the Prix Littéraire des Ambassadeurs de la Francophonie en Irlande, and has been translated into several languages. The River Capture is her second novel. Her second short story collection, Barcelona, has just been published by Canongate.