When it comes to escaping an abusive relationship, it’s said that leaving is the simple part; the real challenge is not returning. For Ciara Fay, pregnant and with her two small girls in tow, the difficulty is magnified by Dublin’s housing crisis, still one of the worst in Europe. Having finally bundled the kids into the car, along with a few impulsively grabbed necessities and the little cash she’s been able to save, hidden in a nappy, she’s faced with a stark question: where are they to go?
Nesting, Roisín O’Donnell’s compulsive debut novel, makes of Ciara’s bid for safety and freedom a minutely observed, heart-juddering drama. To the casual onlooker, husband Ryan is a well-dressed, mass-attending civil servant, but over the course of their five-year marriage he has subjected Ciara to relentless emotional abuse and more, isolating her from friends, preventing her from working, controlling their finances. “Things happen at night,” Ciara imagines saying out loud. “My body doesn’t feel like my own.”
She’s fled their suburban home once before, spending three weeks at her mother’s in Sheffield, and Ryan has subsequently put a block on the girls’ passports. With that sanctuary unreachable, Ciara and the children end up in a docklands hotel whose fifth floor doubles as an unofficial homeless shelter. Temporary accommodation, she’s told, but weeks stretch into months and, with her due date nearing, Ryan continues to bombard her with promises and threats.
O’Donnell has already won awards for her short stories, and there’s a spare, compressed intensity to her prose here that sharpens the immediacy of Ciara’s plight. Traps are everywhere: in the bureaucratic maze of a broken social care system and the inertia that it breeds; in family court, whose judges, she’s warned, don’t always acknowledge emotional abuse, and where Ryan is able to use their children to control her; and in Ciara’s own mind, where memories of the attentive, love-struck man she fell for ambush her, even as the mocking voice of the husband he so swiftly became – a voice she’s internalised – leaves her doubting her every feeling. After all, he’s never yet hit her, has he? Perhaps she’s overreacting – perhaps it’s all her fault for failing to understand his needs.
Meanwhile, a crow chick “rescued” by Ryan and effectively rendered unreleasable becomes a gothic motif – slightly jarring in prose that’s otherwise grounded in almost forensic quotidian detail, but dread-stoking nevertheless. There’s a reason birds fledge as soon as they’re able, a man at the wildlife sanctuary informs Ciara. “If you’re a bird, the nest is pretty much the most dangerous place you can be.”
Without relinquishing any tension, O’Donnell vindicates some of the reader’s fears – and, ultimately, hopes – for Ciara. In the process, she turns the idea of the domestic novel inside out, relocating it in emergency accommodation, where every tiny act that goes into keeping two children fed, clothed and convinced that it’s all a big adventure is at once more daunting and more meaningful.
“We’re not targeted for our weaknesses,” Ciara is told at a women’s shelter. “We’re targeted for our strengths.” Ciara’s rediscovered resilience is what might save her. It’s also a reproach that makes Nesting not just riveting and deeply humane but – in an understated, “domestic” way – radical, too.
• Nesting by Roisín O’Donnell is published by Scribner (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
