Breakdown : The humane Irish Bestseller about the dark side of modern motherhood

by Sweeney, Cathy | Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)
Published 27/02/2025 by Orion Publishing Co (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) in the United Kingdom
Paperback | 224 pages
129 x 197 x 19mm | 198g

From the Irish Tatler's Woman of the Year for Literature and one of the AN Post Irish Book Awards's Best New Irish Writers comes a novel about one woman's decision to leave everything behind 'Thrillingly relatable' Harper's Bazaar'This funny, thoughtful novel will resonate with lots of women' Good Housekeeping'You won't be able to put this down. A fascinating study of a woman who has sacrificed her dreams' The Gloss'A masterful account of one woman's dramatic rebellion against society's demands'Daily Express'A vivid portrait of a woman adrift' ObserverMothers are not supposed to go on road trips . . .

But one winter morning in Dublin, an ordinary woman wakes up in her ordinary home, her husband next to her in bed, her teenage children sleeping nearby. And - without thinking much about it - walks out the front door and never comes back.

So begins a journey which will take her into service stations and shopping centres, hotel bars and hairdressers - and the beds of strange men.

Until finally, forty-eight hours later, alone in a cottage in Wales, the woman faces up to what she has been ignoring inside herself, her family, modern society: signs of breakdown.