Charleen Hurtubise's SAOIRSE

Thanks to #partner @celadonbooks for the ARC of Charleen Hurtubise's Saoirse. The book will be published on February 24! 

I was so thrilled to read Charleen Hurtubise’s Saoirse (you can find the synopsis below), and I found that it more than lived up to my expectations. This book was an easy five-star read for me.

Hurtubise reveals Saoirse’s full story layer by layer, weaving between past and present to show both who she was and who she has become. Her current life, which centers on art and love for her partner and her two young daughters, is all that she hoped for, but there’s a constant sense of the threat that she fears lurking beneath this beauty. As a reader, I desperately wanted the new life, the existence she manifested as she clawed her way out of her old life, to last . . . but I feared that it couldn’t.

The writing here is gorgeous, unflinching in its portrayal of ugliness but equally vivid in communicating love and hope, and there’s a perfect balance of plot and character that meant I could hardly bear to stop reading. What a stunning novel.

​Synopsis:

“For readers of Colm Tóibín and Claire Keegan, Saoirse is a powerful novel set between the United States and Ireland about a woman who runs from her traumatic past and the secrets she carries to survive.

“In Michigan, Sarah’s childhood was defined by fear and silence. As a teenager, she saw a chance to escape and took it. Now, in 1999, she is an artist living on the rugged coast of Donegal, Ireland, where she is known as Saoirse (pronounced Sear-sha)—a name that sounds like the sea and means freedom in the language of her adopted country. And free is precisely how she is finally beginning to feel. Her partner and two beloved daughters are regular subjects of her paintings, and together they have made the safe home she always longed for. But Saoirse's secrets haunt her. No one must learn of the identity she has stolen in order to survive; they cannot know of the dangers that she crossed an ocean to escape.

“When her artwork wins unexpected acclaim at a Dublin exhibition, the spotlight of fame threatens to unravel the careful lies that hold her world together. Journalists and admirers begin to ask questions about the mysterious artist from Donegal, and she fears the unwanted publicity will expose all that she has done.

“Saoirse is an evocative, suspenseful exploration of the intimate relationship between art and life and the lies we tell ourselves in the name of reinvention.”

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