An astonishing debut from a brilliant and original voice in Irish fiction. Now part of the Picador Collection

Winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize
Winner of the Sunday Independent Best Newcomer Award
Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book of the Year

Solace by Belinda McKeon is a dazzling story of love, family and divided loyalties.

Mark Casey did not expect to fall in love. But from the minute he saw Joanne Lynch across the garden of a Dublin pub, it seemed that nothing else was possible.

But Mark is also drawn back – guiltily – to his family and the land they have farmed for generations, and when he discovers the truth behind a family feud, it threatens to destroy this passionate love affair.

‘A novel of quiet power, filled with moments of carefully told truth’ - Colm Tóibín, author of Long Island

‘Elegant, consuming and richly inspired. Superb’ - Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon

Part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the best of modern literature.

"She writes with a precision that is moving without being sentimental. She is superb on the inarticulate coming-to-terms between a father and his son. Patient to a fault, this author demands patience from her reader, but it is the kind of patience that is worth cultivating" - The Sunday Times

"An excellent musing on families and relationships . . . She hooks the reader with words unsaid; stolen glances; simmering anger – which hold the heaviness of a lifetime of buried emotion, but also of unconditional love . . . Solace is a warm and wise debut from a new literary talent" - The Economist

"Solace is a gentle, haunting meditation on the bonds of family and, ultimately, what it means to love" - Sunday Express

"A fine example of the modern Irish novel . . . An irrepressible power runs through the finely crafted text . . . This is a beautifully small story that loses none of its intimacy by encompassing the breadth of a country and acknowledging an entire generation" - The Sunday Times Ireland

"At once a moving and gracefully etched story of human loss and interconnection set in contemporary Ireland and a deeply affecting meditation on being in the world" - The Irish Times

"Few Irish debuts have been as praised as Belinda McKeon’s Solace and, given her assured prose and unsentimental yet empathetic storytelling, it’s little wonder . . . Tentative, tender and effortlessly moving" - Metro

"Eloquent precision is everywhere in the novel . . . McKeon has obviously learned a great deal from the likes of McGahern and Colm Tóibín, but she has taken the lessons of these masters and constructed something that is very much her own" - Sunday Business Post

"McKeon keeps all the plates spinning, plotting in perfectly timed cliffhangers . . . and draws you into the lives of the Caseys and the Lynches with grace. Her prose style is simple to the point of plain yet it illuminates her characters with the intensity of a searchlight . . . Solace is impossible to put down" - The Sunday Herald