Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way

Author Elaine Feeney
Narrator Elaine Feeney
Publisher Random House
Publish Date 29 May 2025
Run Time 8 hours and 21 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Family life fiction, Generational sagas, Modern and contemporary fiction, Narrative theme: Identity / belonging, Narrative theme: Love and relationships, Narrative theme: Politics.

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED NOVELS OF 2025 AS SELECTED BY THE OBSERVER, THE IRISH TIMES, JOURNAL.IE, RTE GUIDE AND SUNDAY TIMES IRELAND

The deeply moving story of the O’Connor family, its troubled past in the West of Ireland, and a love story of second chances from the Booker-longlisted author of How to Build a Boat'

Claire O’Connor’s life has been on hold since she broke up with Tom Morton and moved from London back home to the rugged West of Ireland to care for her dying father. But glimpses of her old life are sure to follow when Tom unexpectedly moves nearby. As Claire is thrown into a love she thought she’d left behind, she questions if Tom has come for her or for himself.

Living in her childhood home brings its own challenges. While Claire tries to maintain a normal life – getting lost online, going to work and minding her own business – Tom’s return stirs up haunting memories trapped within the walls of the old family house.

Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way is a story of love and resilience, rich with history and drama, and the legacies of violence and redemption. As the secrets of the past are revealed, Claire must confront whether she can escape her history to make a future for herself.

Elaine Feeney is one of Irish literature's most gifted and persuasive storytellers' SINÉAD GLEESON

'An uncanny understanding of the workings of the human heart. I loved this book' LOUISE KENNEDY

'Full of humanity, a story for our times' MARY COSTELLO

© Elaine Feeney 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

Critics Review

A superb, multi-generational story told in stunning, poetic prose. Elaine Feeney is one of Irish literature's most gifted and persuasive storytellers.

Sinu00e9ad Gleeson

In Let Me Go Mad in my Own Way Elaine Feeney reaches from a stagnant present to a troubled past, with an uncanny understanding of the workings of the human heart. I loved this book.

Louise Kennedy

This book touched my soul. It tells the story of a woman searching for home, and healing. It moves between the past and the present, highlighting the dark histories of rural Ireland, and its men. A perfect depiction of the complicated relationships we have with ourselves and our histories.

Katriona O'Sullivan

This novel lulls the reader with its lyrical beauty, then slowly devastates with its raw passion and pain. Feeney shows how the political is always personal, and how the legacy of violence and trauma continues to wreak havoc on people's lives. Shocking, intelligent and full of humanity, this is a story for our times.

Mary Costello

Hugely powerful ... questions of revolution, restitution and, perhaps, resolution swirl in the unsettled mix of this visceral, stimulating tale that is likely one of the most original you'll read this year

Daily Mail

This is a clear-eyed and deep-hearted calibration of accumulating trauma, which Feeney skillfully conveys the scope and heft of while considering what it might take to halt it in its devastating tracks. She has the novelist's instinct of wanting to get to the bottom of painful situations, yet she is also a first-class poet who knows that painful situations are often fathomless and ineffable. What we get then is a driven, tenacious, and probing narrative, made up of deeply expressive sentences that bristle and ache. Curious, sensitive, and unfeignedly visceral, Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way packs an intellectual and emotional punch as it asks that most difficult of questions u2013 What now?

Claire-Louise Bennett

I simply love Elaine Feeney's writing. Let Me Go Mad In My Own Way is proof, if any was needed, that she is one of the finest writers of her generation. This book moves effortlessly through humour, tragedy and devastation with great formal inventiveness. It is a brilliant exploration of how violence, oppression and hatred, both personal and political, can warp and overshadow a life. This is a hugely ambitious novel wrought with Feeneyu2019s trademark lyricism and emotional intelligence... Feeney will break your heart with her characters but she will also lovingly put it back together again.

Edel Coffey

Much will be said about Feeney's warmth, compassion and bravery on the page, but even beyond such achievements, her writing is so natural, so apparently effortless, that it seems at times miraculous.

Lisa McInerney

An astonishing achievement - a book that illuminates in a wholly fresh and innovative manner how echoes of violence echo down the family line, shifting realities in the present tense. A book about how women hold power and space within cruelly Byzantine patriarchal structures, and how the truths passed down by women from generation to generation create a shadow history that stands as a corrective to received narratives. It's also a vivid, witty and moving read told in Feeney's inimitable style, with an ensemble of unforgettable characters at its heart.

Jessica Traynor

Threads together small everyday truths with vast, overarching, horrifying, revelatory ones u2013 property, work, what writing is for, homes and their ghosts, what it means to be part of a nation reborn from violence that is never really far awayu2026 Reading it feels at once like a beautiful digressive trip through modern life, and a far-wider-reaching, wildly ambitious vision of what it means to be Irish and a person right now.

Roisin Kiberd

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