Mary Costello (2) (1963–)

This book is a delight. An evocation of almost the whole life of Tess, born in Ireland, but who goes to America as a young woman. Here is a woman whose whole life is understated: a woman whom few would remember for long, having once met her: decent, conscientious, quiet and shy: a woman who makes one life-changing mistake. This is a book that reminds me, as other have said, of Stoner, but also of Colm Tóibín's Nora Webster, and Eilis Lacey in Brooklyn. Graceful and beautifully written, this is a book to savour.… (mais)

In the opening sequence of Academy Street, Mary Costello’s moving and minutely observed debut novel, seven-year-old Tess Lohan’s mother has died. The setting is a farm in the west of Ireland in the 1940s. Tess is heartbroken, her father devastated. Times are tough already, but, for the Lohan family, they are about to get tougher. Over the next 145 pages, Costello’s novel follows Tess from her bleak rural childhood to a career as a nurse in New York City, and through to old age in the new century. After her mother’s death, the household is shrouded in an atmosphere of penitential dreariness, from which it never wholly emerges. Tess comes of age, but she is a socially awkward, inward-looking young woman, painfully conscious of her deficiencies, unsure of the kind of life she wants to live. That life, it turns out, is elsewhere. In 1962, at about age 20, having completed her nursing training, she follows her older sister Claire to New York and finds a position. Gradually, haltingly, she builds a life of her own in the city and grows less dependent on family. She moves into an apartment—“a fifth-floor walk-up, at 471 Academy Street, in Inwood”—with Anne, another nurse, also from Ireland. The two become friends and often venture out to explore the city’s night life. But Tess is dissatisfied. Her reticent nature is constantly at odds with a yearning for companionship and love. Then she meets Anne’s cousin David. The attraction is immediate, profound and all-consuming. But when their brief affair ends, Tess is once again alone and her life is forever changed. This is a novel that swells with emotion. Costello’s depiction of Tess’s private inner world is intimate, often painfully so. We are in her head throughout the book, privy to every notion passing through her mind, every moment of confusion or regret, every agony of self-doubt. We share the sting of her distress over tragic and bewildering personal losses and guilt over what she sees as shameful moral failures. Costello’s haunting, elegant prose is stunningly evocative of the rhythms of daily life in rural Ireland of the 1940s and 50s and New York in the raucous latter half of the 20th-Century. From the first page, Academy Street grips the reader by the throat and immerses him in a life in a constant state of flux. Costello, from Galway, is also the author of a book of stories, The China Factory. This novel, which won the Irish Book of the Year Award in 2014, solidifies Mary Costello’s status as a writer of understated yet powerful and emotionally authentic fiction.… (mais)

A favorite....the life of Tess Lohan from a child in Ireland to an adult in New York. Just Tess's story...the writing is beautiful and observations by Tess and others are so interesting and relatable.

'There did not seem to be enough hours or days or years left in her life to read all she wanted to read.'

'She became herself, her most true self, in those hours among books. I am made for this she thought.'

'Years before, she had thought poetry beyond her.'

There are many more beautiful quotes to find in this book.… (mais)