'What a joy it is to read'
Michael Magee, author of Close to Home

'I couldn't put this book down'
Sheena Patel, author of I'm A Fan

'Powerful, moving, compelling, utterly enthralling'
Jon McGregor, author of Reservoir 13

'A prodigiously talented author: funny and brutal by turns'
Guardian

'The style of Woolf but the heart of Dickens'
Sunday Times

'Vital reading'
Spectator

'I miss it already . . . What a beautiful, hilarious blast of brilliance'
Donal Ryan, author of Heart, Be at Peace

'A cast of characters so vividly drawn it feels like you've known them all your life'
Colin Walsh, author of Kala


Misty thought of them as friends, the three local boys from wealthy homes. Until upstairs at a house party an act of violence takes place, with lines drawn and repercussions for them all. On her side, Misty has her devoted father Boogie, and the formidable matriarch Nan D. On theirs, the boys have their mothers - Frankie, Bronagh and Miriam will use the considerable power at their disposal to protect their own children.

And all the while, anonymous voices across the city confide in us, sometimes offering us another perspective on what has happened, but more often telling their own stories - inviting us briefly into lives shaped by money and class, by family and love.

Shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize

Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction

"Riveting . . . a polyphonic drama of money and class . . . Erskine's eye for detail keeps us rapt" - Observer

"This Belfast novel has the style of Woolf but the heart of Dickens . . . Erskine - a gifted short story writer who has been longlisted for the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award - deploys a style closer to Virginia Woolf than to HBO, delivering scattershot glimpses of events through the eyes of a broad cast of characters . . . for all the formal subtlety and fragmentation of this impressive novel, then, it is amazing to see there is such a warmly conventional heart beating beneath the Woolfian multiple perspectives and the deliberate haziness with which Erskine depicts the novel's central act of class-based injustice" - Sunday Times

"This polyphonic portrait of class, power and social exclusion in Northern Ireland - the debut novel from an award-winning short story writer - is centred on the assault of a teenage girl, and the reactions of the boys' parents. Erskine is a nimble, prodigiously talented author: funny and brutal by turns, with an extraordinary immediacy." - Guardian

"Sparklingly polyphonic . . . The Benefactors might sound like one of those ripped-from-the-headlines, state-of-the-young-people, how-would-you-feel-if-this-happened-to-you sort of novels that publishers try to sell to book clubs - the sort of novel that is supposed to provoke a meaningful discussion about "issues". (Side-note: a good novel is itself a meaningful discussion of "issues", aka the varieties of human experience.) But the effect of Erskine's polyphonic method is to undermine op-ed simplicities, to insist on complexity. As one of her anonymous voices puts it, "no one should presume anything at any point about anybody" . . . magnificently enigmatic, persuasive, fresh. It takes a good writer to mobilise such a range of voices, moods, perceptions. It takes a very good writer indeed to offer us characters who, like actual people, speak so beautifully for themselves" - Irish Times

"Northern Ireland's most exciting novelist . . . a polyphonic narrative about Belfast, class, parenting, and the aftermath of a sexual assault, served up with an undertow of politics . . . an absorbing and clever structure that feels fresh and exciting" - Daily Telegraph

"Wendy Erskine's first novel arrives after two collections that stake her claim to be the most talented Irish short story writer to emerge from either side of the border in the past decade . . . the voice is intimate and flexible, inviting us to ridicule a character's failings one minute and understand them the next, offering and then resisting caricature. Through the interplay with the first-person vignettes we gain a panorama of character that includes what these people no longer know about themselves . . . The reader will come away from the book with a sense of a writer of an unrivalled range of imaginative empathy, and of a city teeming with joy and sadness." - Financial Times

"A cacophony of voices meet in The Benefactors in connected and often seemingly utterly disconnected ways, all of them given Erskine's trademark attention to character, all of them like mini short stories of their own . . . the success of The Benefactors is the way it treads across familiar fare . . . and tackles them in surprising ways" - Harper's Bazaar

"A truly special author - so special that you want to keep her for yourself . . . with a voice that is crystal clear and a viewpoint that takes in the world's cruelties and joys, Erskine's talent shines in The Benefactors . . . one of [Ireland's] finest contemporary writers" - Irish Independent

"I'm already hooked" - Sunday Times

"The dialogue and the descriptive prose, showing the inner and outer worlds of the novel, are extraordinary. I think this will be one of the most admired and talked-about books this year" - Irish Times

"Deftly tackle[s] dark subject matters" - Sunday Times

"Debut novel by the acclaimed short-story writer about class and family in Northern Ireland" - Guardian

"The Benefactors is fantastic. It's really stuck with me since I finished it" - Observer

"In her first novel, [Erskine] revels in the possibilities of an expanded cast, yet controls the pace and framing with all the precision of a miniaturist. The result is a novel that feels like a balancing act: at once sprawling and meticulous, polyphonic and tonally coherent. The Benefactors is ambitiously structured, but functions in some ways as a short story with a novel around it. At the book's heart is a pivotal, life-altering moment. Gracefully flowing into and out of it are the day-to-day lives that the moment both springs from and distorts, rendered in a tapestry of third-person narration and unattributed interjections of monologue - a kind of community chorus, commenting and adding colour . . . Erskine's great gift is for character. Not a single figure in this novel feels contrived; all are complicatedly flawed and empathetically rendered . . . a work of great assurance and precision" - Guardian

"It's no surprise that her excellent debut novel somehow manages to make room for more than 50 characters, thanks to a polyphonic structure stringing loosely connected cameos around the main drama . . . a bold narrative experiment, given legs by Erskine's near-magical ability to imagine her way into the tiniest details of everyday life." - Daily Mail

"A manifesto for class warfare; a study of sex and money; and a portrait of Belfast" - Observer

"One of the best books of the year" - Belfast Telegraph

"A stand-out debut . . . maybe it's the cacophony of voices, but Jeffrey Eugenides kept popping into my head. I'd highly recommend this vibrant, sometimes hilarious, at times bleak novel set in Belfast, featuring a rich cast of distinctly 'Erskinesque' characters" - Irish Examiner

"This blistering debut novel from the acclaimed short-story writer Wendy Erskine circles around a case of sexual assault, expanding into a polyphonic story that is at once an evocative fictional oral history of contemporary Belfast, a powerful depiction of trauma and a provocative exploration of social power dynamics . . . The Benefactors is vital reading, both for its lively energy and its political weight" - Spectator

"You think you know the Belfast novel - it's all peace walls, sectarian divides, centuries-old divisions. But Wendy Erskine's The Benefactors looks at something quite different: how money divides us. It tells the story of Misty, from a poor background, who is sexually assaulted by three posh boys, and how the system is balanced against her when she tries to seek justice. Erskine's style is fragmentary and experimental, but the morals behind it are pleasingly old-fashioned - our enamoured reviewer compared her to both Virginia Woolf and Charles Dickens." - The Times

"I loved Wendy Erskine's The Benefactors - brimming over with the glorious, complex humanity of its city" - Irish Times