Soldier Sailor: 'One of the finest novels published this year' The Sunday Times

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Kilroy does think sometimes of the novels that might have been, but then she wouldn’t have Lawrence, and she would do anything for him, do without anything. “That is the power of being a parent. But I hope we reach a time where we don’t talk about motherhood; it’s parenthood.” If Kilroy’s novel ended here, it would have done more than enough to locate her among the ranks of motherhood’s laureates alongside the likes of Helen Simpson, Rachel Cusk and Sarah Moss. But it doesn’t. The final section expands – abruptly, beautifully, agonisingly – to grapple with the true existential crisis at the heart of motherhood: the understanding, born with the baby, that we’re all time’s prisoners and “it will do us in in the end”. We crawl out, ultimately, from the chaos of early motherhood, but the love continues to obliterate us. “I wasn’t scared of dying until you were born,” Soldier says towards the novel’s close. Forget the sleepless nights; that’s the real horror, right there.

Valerian, campion, speedwell, vetch. There are gentle things in this world. Gentle but resilient. Be one of them“Breathtaking . . . terrifyingly well-observed and articulated, often extremely funny, and there is a pleasure to be found even in the skewering precision of its despair.' I realised retrospectively the love interest is my love for the novel, the imagination. I don’t remember that character, my friend, coming, and there is a whole chapter, my favourite in the book, the beach, that was just there in the notes file. I don’t remember writing it. I just lifted it. It was born without the pain of birth.” I would say approach with caution if you're pregnant - or maybe not. Maybe someone needs to spell out how bloody hard it is when you have your first baby! There are a couple of scenes that are very uncomfortable to read and a lot of marital strife. A super read. 4/5 stars Soldier Sailor, the new novel by Irish writer Claire Kilroy, is all about voice. And what a voice it is!

Soldier Sailor is the most uncompromising, provocative novel I’ve read in quite some time. . . As honest as fiction gets.’ JOHN BOYNE The Sailor of the title is the baby, while Soldier is the mother, one of the “infancy infantry” performing the thankless daily drill of raising the next generation, “struggling to contain your screams while struggling to contain my own”. Reading Soldier Sailor is an intense experience, but an immensely rewarding one. It is full of heightened, hard-won emotions articulated with a rare eloquence. “Love will sluice over you like sunlight,” Soldier tells her son. I miss my old life like I’d miss a lover", Kilroy’s narrator says, and in many ways this novel reads like a ghost story or post-war epic, following a woman as she stands in the ruins of her life, haunted by former versions of herself, tormented by the looming future. Every woman on earth will identify with this book. Every man will learn something urgent to his betterment. It sings with great authority about the wretched entrapment and molecular joy of motherhood, doing for Irish prose what Eavan Boland did for poetry. A radiant and fearless work of universal import.' Sailor is a handful in the same way that any baby or toddler is. Their existence and demands are endless. Soldier’s husband is busy at work, distinctly absent in caring for their child, so she feels isolated and alone in this new, intense way of life.Soldier Sailor is a fictional novelisation of the experiences Claire Kilroy originally documented in her 2015 essay F ofr Phone.