When the first line of a novel starts ‘ My mother. At night, my mother creaks’, you know that this book is certainly going to be nothing like you have read for a while!

Linking the two is Lexi, the co-host of a Call Me Daddy-esque podcast, Your Hot Friend, which Claire and Joanne’s partner Bert both devour. Lexi is the sensible foil to co-host Amanda, who is referred to as "the female Joe Rogan" in a magazine write-up. The island made people do things, said the old people. And maybe, yes, for the island to remain so cold to what it has witnessed, it must have some hand in it. The only giveaway in My Hot Friend would be the searing honesty, and White’s astounding ability to chase down the uncomfortable and disturbing truths of living and painstakingly examine them. Where I End is an exceptionally unsettling but beautiful tale about the horrors that come in the every day for an isolated and stunted teenager called Aoileann. It's also about motherhood, the private disasters people endure, and the difference between living, surviving, and merely existing. By the time the first census was recorded, the mainlanders had settled on more ho-hum aversion: the islanders were ugly; they were poor; their Irish was incomprehensible. In spring 1931, the island was home to 187 souls. About ten families, all fishing and living a spartan existence.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. White is incisive on how the Internet trades on women and body image, and how this has shifted in recent years, writing, "The fact was, ‘hotness ’wasn’t just a ‘state of mind’, as they’d endlessly proclaimed on the podcast. It took work."

All of this is near the beginning of the story, where the protagonist, a nineteen-year-old girl who was born on the island, talks increasingly about death. Aoileann, a 19-year-old girl, spends her days helping her paternal grandmother care for her mother who is bed-bound after an unspoken family tragedy. Unschooled and friendless, Aoileann bathes, feeds and dresses her mother using a series of makeshift hoists, hiding her from the outside world and dressing her up specially for Dada, who visits once a month. When Rachel, an artist, arrives on the island with her newborn son, Aoileann sees the life she never had and a future she never dreamed of until now. It is a novel that encompasses so many things. What it means to be a mother, the mother daughter relationship, duty, desire and anger too. In Aoileann, White has created a character who works so well because we are fascinated as to why she hates her mother, yet still cares for her. We see how Aoileann is desperate to love and be loved, but comes to hate her mother for the life she is forced to live. Aoileann is treated with suspicion and malice by the islanders, and doesn’t interact with them. She has no friends and little time for herself. Her only respite is when she can escape to swim in the sea, away from the responsibilities and demands that caring for her mother brings.

Aoileann has little interaction with the other people on the island who treat her as accursed ( The taint is something unique to me, I have learned. The islanders call it scáth suarach anama. Soul-stench), except when sometimes men come across her in a deserted location when they casually rape her, treating her as an object in rather the way she thinks about her mother. When artist Rachel arrives on the island with her young son, Aoileann befriends her and begins to make herself indispensable in Rachel’s life. In Where I End by Sophie White, we are introduced to Aoileann, a young woman who lives with her grandmother and bed bound mother in a remote cottage, where they can live their lives away from the curious and disgusted looks from the locals on the island. Aoileann’s mother is not from the island, but her father was. He is now only a monthly visitor to the island, and every day Aoileann and her grandmother are responsible for the daily care of her mother. I coloured it because my kids kept getting nits. It’s so glamorous!” she says, with typical candour. “It took about five hours. I was like: how do people do this on the regular shift? But I sat there and wrote my column while they did it.” In Where I End, White tells the story of three generations of women living in an island that is and also isn’t based on the Aran Islands.

I didn’t approach Where I End as: this will be my literary fiction debut. But I’m very happy that they’ve decided it is because I love literary fiction. I read as much literary fiction as commercial fiction. I don’t differentiate. I don’t think a lot of readers do.” Aoileann’s daily life is punctuated by routine and thankless tasks, interspersed with taunting and humiliating her mother for the life she cannot have and the mother she cannot bond with. It is while scrubbing the floor of the cottage that she starts to see markings scratched on the floors where she realises that her mother has attempted to escape during the night, and when Aoileann writes them all down, she realises her mother has secrets and a past that that will slowly come to light which will impact her world in ways she cannot imagine. 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 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. As part of the mainland authority’s decision to try and boost tourism to the island with the addition of a new museum, a visiting artist, Rachel and her new-born baby Seamus, are allocated housing for a few weeks, so that she can prepare an opening exhibition of her work. Immediately Aoileann is smitten with the new mother, although she develops a very unhealthy obsession with her breastfeeding habits and begins to resent Seamus in a disturbing way. Rachel is so consumed by the tiredness of new motherhood and the need to produce her artwork apace, that she completely misses the signs of Aoileann’s conniving, lies and duplicity, which become life threatening as they grow in magnitude.The scenario, though, gifts us with this zinger: "How do you explain to your dad - who still laments the end of Teletext - what being humiliated live on the internet even means?" Islanders pulled grateful survivors from the sea,’ the stories said. ‘Saving them from drowning only to deliver them to a worse end.’