Encountering her is physically overwhelming. My body is opening to her with an exuberance I don't recognize. Her body arouses in me the same sense of altered state that the ocean does." Aoileann’s every word, thought and deed, oozed hatred and malignant, malevolent intent. However, this was beautifully balanced and nuanced against some barely discernible and well disguised moments of loss and longing, as she searched for that illusive something she knew she had lost, or maybe never had, knowing it had left her damaged and somehow incomplete, whilst at the same time her awakening femininity saw her trying to disseminate and come to terms with her own sexuality. The house in which Aoileann is at the furthest, least accessible, part of the island and its windows have been boarded up with stones. Aoileann lives with her paternal grandmother, an islander, who she calls Móraí, and her mother, originally from the mainland. But no-one on the island knows that her mother is there, believing her to have died around the time Aoileann was born, and she is bed-bound and dumb, seemingly in some form of permanent post-natal depression, and is treated by Aoileann and Móraí as little more than an animal, or perhaps, even worse an object. The island seems to be some kind of breac-ghaeltacht, but what’s spoken there is a dialect barely related to Irish. Aoileann lives on the most rural part of a small, hostile island, cut off from the local community. Her paternal grandmother rules the roost; her shattered, guilt-ridden father comes and goes; and her mother - or what's left of her - lies bed-bound, silent, staring, gaping. They are survivors of a devastating catastrophe; an incident that has made them outcasts, despite being islanders themselves.

Once Aoileann has worked out a plan, she decides that she is going to manipulate the situation so that she is able to leave the island with Rachel when she goes – Will she be able to adapt to mainland living, or is her mental health too badly damaged? And will Rachel live (or die) to regret her decision? Where I End is Sophie White’s first piece of literary fiction, published last month. I read all the content warnings about this book but nothing could have prepared me for how disturbing it was. Bloody hell! Meanwhile Aoileann's father lives on the mainland and visits once a month and while he is aware of his wife's condition Aoileann and her grandmother put on a show that they take better care of her:Teenager Aoileann has never left the island. Her silent, bed-bound mother is the survivor of a private disaster no one will speak about. Aoileann desperately wants a family, and when Rachel and her newborn son move to the island, Aoileann finds a focus for her relentless love. Those we did understand seemed unperturbed by what appears to have been a mass death of 21 people since March of ’31.

It seems useless to even try in this hateful place. The thing in the bed may even have the right idea: to succumb, to beg, to be ended. The thing in the bed is maybe privy to something. Or perhaps is just more willing than the others to face what this place is capable of. beautiful and strange’ – Louise O’Neill ‘deeply creepy and compelling’ – John Connolly ‘Disturbing, brutal, chilling, this book truly is a horror. It’s also Sophie White’s best book yet.’ – Doireann Ní Ghríofa ‘Tremendous; the transition from pity to fear, as we warily circle Aoileann’s brutalised psyche, is brilliantly done.’ GUARDIAN ‘This is a truly different Irish novel. One that entwines Irish myth, the reality of human bodies, life and death, and traditional gothic horror in a macabrely beautiful and, in the end, redemptive dance.’ IRISH INDEPENDENTWe were brought to the island’s rudimentary ‘cemetery’ (located on the island’s high exposed north east side, see marked map on file). The practices around burial are unusual. We are told by Rionach (girl, about 17) that they cannot dig the island – at its deepest the soil layer is barely a forearm’s length – hence their ‘solution’. Island children play in the area and appear unfazed by the macabre spectacle to be found there. Rionach intimates that the island suffers losses of this scale frequently due to the dangerous nature of fishing the surrounding waters. When it was pointed out that if this were the case, then the island’s population would have died out long ago, the girl ceased to cooperate. At night, my mother creaks. The house creaks along with her. Through our thin shared wall, I can hear the makings of my mother gurgle through her body just like the water in the walls of the house…

Móraí works there on its opening. It has an artist-in-residence, Rachel, who arrives with her infant son. Aoileann meets her on the beach and finds a focus for her perverse understanding of love.

Undersocialised and unloved, Aoileann fantasises about a proper family and when Rachel, a young artist, arrives on the island with her infant son, Aoileann finds herself drawn to their unit and resolves to make herself indispensable to the tired, lonely mother. The islanders use this word for all kinds of darkness. Muddy gloom and deep voids. They call the bottom of sea 'an ghrinneall dhorcha’, the dark bed. So when artist Rachel arrives temporarily on the island with her baby son, Aoileann is entranced. Bewitched by this young woman with leaking breasts & m a kind but exhausted face, their friendship begins, but how will it end? The actual footprint this story occupies is quite finely focussed, however the narrative surrounding the physical appearance and ‘feeling’ of specific locations is wonderfully descriptive, creating excellent enhanced visual awareness, for any confirmed ‘armchair travellers’ who are brave enough to visit. My mother. At night, my mother creaks. The house creaks along with her. Through our thin shared wall, I can hear the makings of my mother gurgle through her body, just like the water in the walls of the house. I hate the sound. In the daytime, it is covered, wrapped up in the radio and the wind and the low hum of the electricity. But at night, in the silence, her insides gush and she seems alive in a way that, during daylight, she does not. The gush forces thoughts of her effluent, her needs; of the things my grandmother takes care of but that I will have to do someday soon. I don’t want to, which makes me feel bad. I hate her body–it’s an awful thing.

Aoileann is a solitary figure - ignored and shunned by the other inhabitants of the Irish island she lives on, she spends her days in a dark, lonely house with her grandmother - the two of them looking after the 'bed thing' that is Aoileann's mother. When a young mother arrives to the island, Aoileann develops a scary obsession with the woman and a growing resentment towards the child. Aoileann has never encountered a Mother or Mothering. There are references to her heartbreaking younger attempts at mother-daughter interaction with the "bed-thing", and how that connection was never found with Móraí either. Aoileann has grown up never witnessing closehand a Mother, or a woman's existence. She's taken in with Rachel, like sea-swimmers are with the bite of the ocean. A small and well-defined central cast of characters held sway over this story, with their dour and brooding persona and aura of impending doom. They were all pretty uncompelling, disturbing, loathsome individuals, and not one of them did I have any real empathy with, or sympathy for. Yes! They were definitely given a strong voice with which to tell their story, however it got to the stage where I simply couldn’t trust a single word which came out of any of their mouths! At best they were complex, volatile and unreliable, at their worst they were manipulative, duplicitous and malevolent. Every time I had the slightest urge to feel even slightly sorry for any one of them, within seconds they had said or done something else to have me seething and truly angry with them, all over again. A cast of ‘extras’ were alluded to, but thankfully didn’t appear in any important capacity, as I don’t think I could have stood the strain.On a remote and forbidding island off the coast of Ireland, a small community of fisher folk, most of whom have never learned to swim, live the same hand to mouth existence as they have for countless decades. Visiting tourists stay but a short time and are actively discouraged from doing so, by insular, inbred locals, who communicate in a dialect all their own and have a physical appearance which is unique and very disturbing to behold. They made the trip to investigate. The note-taker recorded a little of what went on during the questioning. The book is brilliantly paced, superbly tense (think Sleeping With the Enemy-tense) and the tale unspools to reach a terrifying climax. I was gripped at the beginning, filled with a sense of foreboding in the middle and rigid with fear for the last part. Holy smoke. Admirable to be able to evoke such feelings of terror in a reader. Wow. 4/5 ⭐️