"With extraordinary devotion, Mary Costello brings to life a woman who would otherwise have faded into oblivion.”—J. M. Coetzee

WINNER OF THE BORD GÁIS IRISH BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD
A FINALIST FOR THE COSTA FIRST NOVEL AWARD, THE INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD, AND THE EU PRIZE FOR LITERATURE

Tess Lohan is the kind of woman we meet and fail to notice every day. A single mother. A nurse. A quiet woman, who nonetheless feels things acutely—a woman with tumultuous emotions and few people to share them with.

Academy Street is Mary Costello’s luminous portrait of a whole life. It follows Tess from her girlhood in western Ireland through her relocation to America and her life there, concluding with a moving reencounter with her Irish family after forty years of exile. The novel has a hypnotic pull and a steadily mounting emotional force: It speaks of disappointments but also of great joy, capturing, in sentence after sentence, the rhythm and intensity of inner life.