Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way - by Elaine Feeney (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

An Observer, Irish Times, and Sunday Times Ireland 2025 Preview Selection

The Booker-nominated author of How to Build a Boat returns to western Ireland with a multi-generational family story about grief, inheritance, and learning to live with the past--and with yourself.

When Claire O'Connor leaves London to care for her dying father, she leaves everything--including her boyfriend, Tom. But when Tom ends up moving to the same small Irish town for work, he's not the only aspect of the past she must reckon with. Living in the house she grew up in, on the site where generations of her family lived, Claire couldn't be on more familiar ground, yet she struggles with uncertainty--about her relationship, and about how to manage the collision of her worlds, the child she was and the person she's been trying to become. She constructs a routine, spending days at work and evenings on the internet, inspired by influencers as she fixes up the house, but memories of the place, both her own and those of her ancestors, can't be tidied away. As old secrets come to light, Claire must confront the ways that the past creates the future--and in finding her own way, learn to face herself.

A story of grief and inheritance, homecoming and reckoning with your roots, Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way is a profoundly moving exploration of family, violence, history, and hope.

Review Quotes

Praise for Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way

"Feeney reaches from a stagnant present to a troubled past, with an uncanny understanding of the workings of the human heart. I loved this book."
--Louise Kennedy, author of Trespasses

"This is a clear-eyed and deep-hearted calibration of accumulating trauma, which Feeney skillfully conveys the scope and heft of while considering what it might take to halt it in its devastating tracks . . . a driven, tenacious, and probing narrative, made up of deeply expressive sentences that bristle and ache. Curious, sensitive, and unfeignedly visceral, Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way packs an intellectual and emotional punch as it asks that most difficult of questions--What now?"
--Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Pond

Praise for How to Build a Boat

"The interweaving stories of Jamie, a teenage boy trying to make sense of the world, and Tess, a teacher at his school, make up this humorous and insightful novel about family and the need for connection. Feeney has written an absorbing coming-of-age story which also explores the restrictions of class and education in a small community. A complex and genuinely moving novel."
--The Booker Prize 2023 judges

"Atmospheric [. . .] Feeney's prose is both careful and relaxed--detailed in its description of place and character and of the effortful human urge to find order in the natural world; casual in its approach to storytelling."
--Sophie Ward, New York Times

"Harrowing and brilliant."
--New York Magazine

"One of those rare books that leaves you feeling less lonely. An uplifting tale of community, healing and the small connections that can change a life. A gorgeous gift of a novel, hopeful and full of humanity."
--Douglas Stuart, Booker Prize winning author of Shuggie Bain

About the Author

Elaine Feeney is an acclaimed novelist and poet from the west of Ireland. Her debut novel, As You Were, was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Irish Novel of the Year Award, and won the Kate O'Brien Award, the McKitterick Prize and the Dalkey Festival Emerging Writer Award. How to Build a Boat was also shortlisted for Irish Novel of the Year, longlisted for the Booker Prize, and was a New Yorker Best Book of the Year. Feeney has published the poetry collections Where's Katie?, The Radio Was Gospel, Rise and All the Good Things You Deserve, and lectures at the University of Galway.