The Coast Road, Alan Murrin
The Coast Road is the astounding debut novel from new literary talent, Alan Murrin. Set in 1994 County Donegal, before divorce was legalised in Ireland, it’s about the cost of independence for the women trapped in a claustrophobic coastal town.
The story focuses on the return of Colette Crowley, the writer and free spirit who left her husband and children to pursue an affair with a married man in Dublin. Her departure has become as folkloric in the town as a Yeats poem (something she leans into by later naming her rented cottage “Innisfree”), but is Colette truly as wild and bohemian as she presents? How could a mother walk out on her family? How can she show her face again? These are the questions that linger in a community confined by dogma and tradition. Now prevented from seeing her sons by her estranged husband, Colette strikes up a friendship with Izzy Keaveney, the unhappy housewife of a local politician, in the hope that she’ll help her reconnect with them. This friendship unlocks new dreams and desires for both Colette and Izzy but soon descends into something tragic that will change the course of their lives forever.
The melancholic and stifling atmosphere of The Coast Road is helped along by short, vignette-like chapters, which dip in and out of different characters’ inner lives and build a sense of the suffocating gossip that governs their existence. With each changing perspective, we learn of long-held secrets, lies and betrayals, and our access to these intimate moments is reminiscent of the Catholic confessional box – a place a lot of the characters spend their time. Murrin’s well-observed characters fight against the overwhelming sadness and disappointment that beats under the surface of their ordinary lives.
Beautiful and profound, The Coast Road sits in relationship with some of the best contemporary writing coming from Ireland right now. Fans of Claire Keegan, Colm Tóibín and Louise Kennedy will love it.
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