Aoileann lives in a foreboding house on a remote island off Ireland’s coast. She has grown up here, bound by geographical confines and by the confines of her family. Her mother, ‘the bed-thing’, creaks and groans in her bed, needing constant care, uncommunicative by day but on the move at night. Aoileann’s hardened paternal grandmother, ‘Móraí’, also lives there, while her soft, mournful father visits once a month from the mainland. Reviled by the other islanders, Aoileann has no-one to love, and no-one to love her, until a young artist Rachel arrives on the island. And if things were already strange, that’s when they get stranger. 

This is the stuff of horrors and it’s darkly, twistedly brilliant. It’s deeply unsettling, visceral, at times grotesque, exploring how trauma is held in the body and how it manifests itself. The novel is deeply rooted in the landscape of the island, capturing the isolated setting in which Aoileann faces her loneliness, the darkness of the island at night enveloping her as she seeks out comfort. She’s a jarring and complex character, shaped by her environment, who appears one way at the start but, as the story develops, our perception begins to shift. There are striking, descriptive passages around this rugged landscape which holds tension, hostility, even violence against its inhabitants. The islanders themselves are portrayed as cruel and misshapen, strange in appearance, ‘all cowed and crumbling, as though parts of the island have become dislodged and are moving about the place.’ Rachel’s beauty, fullness and vitality stands in complete contrast to them, and to the island as a whole. 

Themes explored include motherhood, mother-daughter relationships, the need for love and affection, obsession, resentment born from imposed duty, and the lengths we go to to get what we need; all skewed and magnified through this strange story rooted in superstition, and both psychological and body horror. Despite how this makes for really uncomfortable reading at points, I couldn’t put it down. White’s writing is striking and beautifully crafted. This book will stay with you long after you read it. Just line up something nice and light as your next read.

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Where I End is published by Tramp Press.

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Sophie White is a novelist, essayist and podcaster from Dublin. She also holds a First-Class Honours degree in Sculpture from NCAD. She is the author of seven books and has previously been the Writer in Residence in DCU and also the Museum of Literature Ireland. Her first four books, Recipes for a Nervous Breakdown (Gill 2016), Filter This (Hachette, 2019), Unfiltered (Hachette, 2020) and The Snag List (Hachette, 2022) have been all bestsellers and award nominees. Her fifth book, the bestselling memoir Corpsing (Tramp Press, 2021), was shortlisted for an Irish Book Award and the Michel Déon Prize for non-fiction. Her sixth book, Where I End (Tramp Press, 2022) was described as “brilliantly visceral” by the Guardian and “exquisite and disturbing, brutish and beautifully crafted” by The Irish Times. It won the Shirley Jackson Award for best novel 2022. Her seventh book and fifth novel, My Hot Friend (Hachette, 2023), won an Irish Book Award for Best Popular Fiction. Her latest book, Such A Good Couple, was published last year. Sophie writes a weekly column ‘Nobody Tells You’ for the Sunday Independent LIFE magazine.