As I’ve written before, probably too often, I was very enthusiastic about Caoilinn Hughes’s short stories and disappointed to find her first two novels less satisfactory, particularly the second of these. I was hopeful that her third novel would be the one to live up to the quality of the short stories. And I’m glad to say that I think The Alternatives (2024) is the novel I had been waiting and hoping for.

It’s not without flaws, of course. It’s a novel, after all, a form that was defined by Randall Jarrell as a prose fiction of a certain length that has something wrong with it. There are passages and episodes in The Alternatives which I found unconvincing or in which a particular set of circumstances could have done with being more precisely drawn. The example of the former that stands out comes in the middle of the book, when Rhona, the second eldest of the four sisters at its centre, unhesitatingly drives over a cat that has been cleaning itself in the middle of the road. Before she hits it she says “Look at the dead cat.” Rhona’s two younger sisters and her 11-month-old son are in the car with her. The sisters are aghast that she didn’t “swerve, like, even slightly” (p. 142).

I hit the horn! Rhona replies sternly. You saw me! What do you want me to do? Swerve my car in this lashing rain with a baby in the back and hydroplane it into Leitrim … all so some cat can keep rimming itself? (p. 143)

Cats hate getting wet, which is why I have trouble accepting that this one sat calmly in the road carrying out its ablutions in the middle of a downpour. Surely it would have found a bush or a hedge or some other kind of shelter, however inadequate. But perhaps the unfortunate creature had become so acclimatized to the weather in the Irish midlands that it had given up hope of ever being able to avoid the rain for very long?

Convincing or not, the episode tells us something about the relationship between the sisters. Rhona is the most outwardly successful: a full professor (of Political Science) in Trinity, with a busy sideline in consultancy, she is pragmatic and decisive. Her rationale for driving straight over the cat in her Tesla Model 3, which is “really too low to the ground” (p. 142) is certainly defensible, but her instruction to “Look at the dead cat” before she hit it seems calculated to provoke her two sisters.

It was Rhona who, at sixteen, persuaded their aunt to authorize the exhumation of their parents’ bodies and arranged autopsies, without discussing it with the other sisters. It turned out that the implausible account they had been given of the parents’ deaths — that they had been blown off a cliff in a high wind — was far from being the whole story.

Rhona is the only one of the sisters who has a child, though Maeve, the third sister, is considering the possibility and Olwen, the eldest, has recently left a relationship with a widower who has two young sons. It is Olwen’s walking out, not just of her relationship with Jaspar and his sons, but of her job in the University of Galway, where she teaches a degree course in Earth Science, that brings all the sisters together for the first time in many years. Maeve comes from London where her success as an Instagram chef has led to a catering business and a three-book deal for cookery books (neither of which activities is without its complications), and Nell from Connecticut, where she is an adjunct professor, not on a tenure track or likely to be, and without health insurance. Her subject is philosophy. She has lost all feeling in her feet, which makes it very difficult for her to walk or drive.

Each sister seems to be partly motivated by an impulse to look after the others, whether they want her to or not. It is Olwen’s sudden disappearance that brings the other three together in a mission to find her and make sure she’s OK. When they turn up at her new home — a formerly derelict bungalow that gets its electricity from solar power and its water from the collection of rainwater — Olwen is not pleased to see them or grateful for their concern. Yet the eldest sister is drinking too much and clearly depressed, apparently because her her work in earth science has convinced her that neither our species nor our planet has a bright future. When, at the end of the novel, Olwen gets into “a spot of bother” (p. 340) and needs rescuing, her sisters have already left and it is to the man who sold her the bungalow and his partner that she turns for help.

Maeve has an accidentally and ambivalently successful career that bewliders Rhona. She started cooking on Instagram as a way of connecting with Nell, who moved to the US when she had finished her doctorate. Success on Instagram led to a contract for a series of cookery books, which in turn led to her catering business, which required her to buy a van which she quickly wrote off, losing £23,000. Maeve has conflicting aims: on the one hand, she wants to be able to fund Nell’s health care bills — while acknowledging that for now Nell can’t even afford exploratory steps to get an idea of what the ultimate cost might be. On the other hand, she wants to take advantage of the success of her first two cookbooks to make her third more political than her publishers are happy with, looking at questions like food shortages and poverty.

In her catering work and in the book it grew from, Maeve insists on using only British-grown produce. Her aim, it’s clearly implied, is to avoid planet-endangering international transport, but the unintended effect is that her work tends to appeal to Brexit-supporters, which may partly account for her success. It becomes clear that Maeve developed her love of and skill at cooking as her way of caring for her sisters, particularly the younger Nell, after their parents had died. The entirely to be expected irony is that her sisters appear to appreciate her efforts much less than her Instagram follwers do. Rhona, for example, drives off with her son shortly before Maeve serves up a mean over which she has spent hours.

The sisters want to help and protect each other partly, I suppose, to assuage their own anxieties and satisfy their own sense of responsibility. But they find it difficult to find a way of helping that is acceptable to the sister being helped. As we’ve seen, Olwen is not pleased to have been sought out by her younger siblings, even though they had good reason to be concerned about her wellbeing. Rhona is particularly good at coming up with interventions that are not entirely acceptable to the supposed beneficiary. She arranges for blood tests to be carried out on Nell (“just preliminary process-of-elimination stuff. To save time”). She also asks Nell to stay in her house for a month, as she thinks she can get her an appointment for an MRI.

The best consultant neurologist in the country owes me a favour, so I’m waiting for his secretary to confirm a slot in early June. His wait list is normally six months and you’d need a referral. My guess is, he’d get you in for an MRI if he suspects neural entrapment or to rule out benign spinal tumours. He’ll check autoimmune stuff, multifocal motor neuropathy. I have my own theories based on some reading. But you don’t need to hear them. (p. 265)

Rhona’s main theory, which Nell insists on hearing, is that the causes of the problem are environmental. Nell, who has increasing difficulty getting about on land, goes for long early morning swims in Long Island Sound. Rhona points out that there is “a huge naval base just across the Thames River from” the University of Connecticut campus which is one of the places that Nell teaches, and it has an active nuclear submarine.

I’ll grant you, topical exposure’s a long shot, but that water’s bound to be military-grade nasty. (p. 266)

Nell cooperates with the blood tests, but says she can’t wait around for the month of June. She will be going back to her several jobs in Connecticut.

When Olwen asks her youngest sister “Why did you run off to America and never come back?”, Nell answers:

Because I couldn’t stand being worried about, she finally said. All the concern — it was suffocating. I’d take a nap and there’d be a thermometer under my tongue. That social worker smile everywhere. I couldn’t move for crashmats. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t be curious. Like, inconspicuously curious. Even just … being bi: I didn’t want a family meeting about it! (p. 325)

While Nell is unwilling or unable to accept the main part of the help offered by Rhona, she urges Maeve to accept Rhona’s offer to her. Maeve has sent an email to her pubishers, asking them to cancel the contract for her third book, and offering to return one third of her advance. Almost immediately she regrets the email and tries to withdraw it, but the publishers like the idea. Rhona has been urging Maeve to simply write the book the publishers want, and keep the one that she has already written for future publication. Now, she puts Maeve in touch with a London lawyer she knows who, she is confident, will be able to get Maeve out of the contract without having to return any of the advance.

While Maeve is undecided, Rhona asks her to come with her when Rhona goes to Coleraine to speak at a panel on direct democracy in Northern Ireland. They can talk through Maeve’s options without interruption and Maeve can find out about the food economy in Northern Ireland. Nell thinks she should go.

I’m not sure what significance to give to the fact that, from oldest to youngest, the sisters’ disciplinary specialisms could be said to move from the sciences to the humanities. Olwen is a geologist who teaches Earth Science. Rhona is a political scientist. This is obviously less a “hard” science, but Rhona is, as we see, practical, “results-oriented” and good at getting her way. Maeve likes to joke that she is the only one of the sisters whose doctorate is honorary, but she takes an experimental and evidence-based approach to her cookery. And Nell is a philosopher.

There’s a funny scene near the end where Nell leads a seminar over Zoom on Heidegger’s concept of “care”.

We inhabit the world by caring for it. Not only the sweet kind, the moral, sentimental, chicken soup kind; to hate is also to care. To slide a knife across a chicken’s throat is to care, too. To mute Nazis is to care about Nazis. (p. 237)

In the meantime, and partly audible to Nell’s students on another continent, Maeve is demonstrating care in her characteristic way, preparing some elaborate dishes which will not be appreciated as they probably deserve to be.

Nell resembles a mythical creature in a way the other sisters don’t. Finding it difficult and painful to walk on land, she is at home in water, which may, however, be the very thing that’s impairing her health. One character even refers to a selkie. It’s a many-stranded novel that I haven’t attempted to deal with comprehensively. I’ve now read it twice, as I almost invariably do with a book before writing about it. More than usual, I feel that I’ve missed quite a lot, and want to read The Alternatives again before too long. I was pleased to read in an interview with Caoilinn Hughes that she has been working on a collection of her short stories. I expect to read that when it comes out (probably when it comes out in small format paperback, which I much prefer to trade paperbacks) and write about it eventually.

Edition: Oneworld paperback, 2025; ellipses in quotations is original.