Книга The Benefactors: The moving and utterly enthralling debut novel about class, power and what being a parent means.
'I couldn't put this book down'
Sheena Patel, author of I'm a Fan
'A powerful, moving, compelling, utterly enthralling debut'
Jon McGregor, author of Reservoir 13
'Perfectly pitched, surefooted, and charged with feeling'
Colin Barrett, author of Wild Houses
From the prize-winning author of Dance Move and Sweet Home, this is an astounding novel about intimate histories, class and money - and what being a parent means.
Meet Frankie, Miriam and Bronagh: three very different women from Belfast, but all mothers to 18-year-old boys.
Gorgeous Frankie, now married to a wealthy, older man, grew up in care. Miriam has recently lost her beloved husband Kahlil in ambiguous circumstances. Bronagh, the CEO of a children's services charity, loves celebrity and prestige. When their sons are accused of sexually assaulting a friend, Misty Johnston, they'll come together to protect their children, leveraging all the powers they possess. But on her side, Misty has the formidable matriarch, Nan D, and her father, taxi-driver Boogie: an alliance not so easily dismissed.
Brutal, tender and rigorously intelligent, The Benefactors is a daring, polyphonic presentation of modern-day Northern Ireland. It is also very funny.
"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
"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
"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