‘An extraordinary achievement. The Amendments is about a lot of things – love, family, girlhood, growing up, sex, legacy, compassion – all blended into a moving plot’ – Jessie Burton

Nell and her partner Adrienne are about to have a baby. For Adrienne, parenthood is the start of a new life. For Nell, it’s the reason the two of them are sitting in a therapist’s office. Because she can’t go into this without facing the painful truth: that she has been a mother before.

For Dolores, Nell’s mother, the news also brings a reckoning: with the way her daughter’s life unfolded fifteen years ago, with its inextricable ties to her own past, and with the tragedy that neither of them have spoken about since . . .

‘Engrossing and moving’ – Emma Donoghue
‘It cuts to the heart of what it means to be human’ – Elizabeth Macneal
‘As significant as it is enjoyable’ – Emma Stonex
‘Wonderfully compelling’ – Joseph O’Connor

The Amendments is the debut novel from Niamh Mulvey, author of Hearts and Bones, and was selected by the Irish Independent, the Irish Times, the Irish Journal and VIP as one of the most anticipated novels of the year.

‘Remarkable: touching, tragic and terribly human’ Sunday Times
‘Enthralling ? close to perfect ? it will speak to and about the lives of many’ Financial Times
‘Expertly crafted ? with all the skill of a master novelist’ John Banville

How far would you go for the missing?

When Clair Wills was in her twenties, she discovered she had a cousin she had never met. Born in a Mother and Baby Home in 1950s Ireland, Mary grew up in an institution not far from the farm where Clair spent happy childhood summers. Yet she was never told of her existence.

How could a whole family – a whole country – abandon unmarried mothers and their children, erasing them from history?

To discover the missing pieces of her family’s story, Clair searched across archives and nations, in a journey that would take her from the 1890s to the 1980s, from West Cork to rural Suffolk and Massachusetts, from absent fathers to the grief of a lost child.

There are some experiences that do not want to be remembered. What began as an effort to piece together the facts became an act of decoding the most unreliable of evidence – stories, secrets, silences. The result is a moving, exquisitely told story of the secrets families keep, and the violence carried out in their name.

Delving into the lives of three generations of women, The Amendments by Niamh Mulvey is an extraordinary novel about love and freedom, belonging and rebellion – and about how our past is a vital presence which sits alongside us.

Nell and her partner Adrienne are about to have a baby. For Adrienne, it’s the start of a new life. For Nell, it’s the reason the two of them are sitting in a therapist’s office. Because she can’t go into this without dealing with the truth: that she has been a mother before, and now she can hardly bring herself to speak to her own mother, let alone return home to Ireland.

Nell is running out of places to hide from her past.

But to Ireland and the past is where she must go, and that is where The Amendments takes us: to the heat of Nell’s teenage years in the early 2000s, as Ireland was unpicking itself from its faith and embracing the hedonism of the Celtic Tiger. To 1983, when Nell’s mother Dolores was grappling with the tensions of the women’s rights movement. And then to the farms and suburbs and towns that made and unmade the lives at the centre of this story, bound together by the terrible secret that Nell still cannot face.

Selected by the Irish Independent, the Irish Times, the Irish Journal and VIP as one of the most anticipated novels of the year.

Bea has a husband and daughter. Bea also has an appointment for a termination. Her first child changed everything – her life, her relationship, her identity. Now she has a pregnancy test and a decision to face.

This is a story about the women we (think we) know, the choices we make, the friends who stand by us and how the secrets we keep and the words left unsaid can be more dangerous than any lie we tell?

• Maquita Gilroy is a Government clerk with a lively sense of self-preservation.
• Anne Carey is drifting between jobs, bored of her fiancé, and longing for something to give her life meaning. Then she meets Philip Dampier, a married man whose plays she admires.
• Petunia Garry, a beautiful teenage chorus girl with no background and dubious morals, is swept up by the idealisticRobert Wentworth, who is determined to mould her into what he wants his wife to be.
• Gertrude Denby, an Admiral’s daughter and an endlessly patient companion to an irritating employer, is so very tired of living out her life in hired rooms.

‘Theoretically – in an ideal society – every woman had a right to a child. The woman who produced her child from motives of love and fulfilment did far more for the race than the woman who became a mother only from a sense of moral obligation in marriage, perhaps. But actually one’s own unmarried niece in producing an illegitimate baby was bringing the most obvious form of shame and disgrace upon everyone concerned. Aunt Minnie was profoundly shaken.’

With an Introduction by Sarah LeFanu, author of Rose Macaulay (2003), and Dreaming of Rose (2021).

A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself traces the complex consequences of one of the most personal yet public, intimate yet political, experiences a family can have: to have a child, and conversely, the decision not to have a child. A woman’s first pregnancy is interrupted by test results at once catastrophic and uncertain, leaving her and her husband, a writer, reeling. A second pregnancy ends in a fraught birth, a beloved child, the purgatory of further tests – and questions that reverberate down the years.

This spare, supple narrative chronicles the flux of parenthood, marriage, and the day-to-day practice of loving someone. As challenging as it is vulnerable, as furious as it is tender, as touching as it is darkly comic, Peter Ho Davies’s new novel is an unprecedented depiction of fatherhood.