'Powerful and searing' Sunday Times Shortlisted for the Kate O'Brien Award 'I was frightened of him in a way - of his grief, his loneliness - for he looked like the loneliest person on earth just then . . . the type of boy who wondered about things, as I did, who broke his heart wondering about things . . .' In 1990s-small-town Ireland, amid the sweaty school discos and first fumblings of adolescence, fifteen-year-old Lani Devine falls in love with Leon Brady, whose mother is buried in the cemetery next to Lani's house. Lani is haunted by the stories of thirty-five orphaned girls, buried in an unmarked grave near Leon's mother. As the love story unfolds, and then unravels, it becomes clear that Leon too is haunted - by a brutal family tragedy that has left scars much more than skin-deep. He Is Mine and I Have No Other is a captivating, eerie and atmospheric novel about the obsessive power of first love, about the claustrophobia a tight-knit family and community can cause, and about buried secrets and the havoc they wreak.
Rebecca O'Connor's first collection of poetry We'll Sing Blackbird was shortlisted for the Shine/Strong Award. Her writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Spectator, Poetry Review and elsewhere. She was a writer in residence at the Wordsworth Trust, the Centre for British Romanticism and is a recipient of a Geoffrey Dearmer Prize. She is co-founder and publisher of The Moth magazine. She lives in County Cavan, Ireland. He Is Mine and I Have No Other is her first novel. @RebeccaMoth | themothmagazine.com
Title: He Is Mine and I Have No Other
Author: O'Connor, Rebecca
ISBN: 9781786892591
Binding:
Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd
Publication Date: 2018-06-07
Number of Pages: 240
Weight: 0.3001 kg
Powerful and searing * * Sunday Times * *
I adored He is Mine and I Have No Other . . . Amazing, heartbreaking, brilliantly done -- DONAL RYAN, author of THE SPINNING HEART and ALL WE SHALL KNOW
My heart broke a little bit for Lani and Leon by the end. He Is Mine and I Have No Other vividly calls up the atmosphere of small-town life, I could positively feel the damp mistiness of it on my skin. Eerie, tender and wonderful -- SOPHIE MACKINTOSH, author of THE WATER CURE
A tender portrait of adolescence in all its rawness and sensitivity . . . This is both a love story and, in a sense, a ghost story. It is a small, self-contained thing, spare and unembellished in its prose style and . . . This extreme lightness of touch gives He Is Mine and I Have No Other a certain elegiac grace * * Irish Times * *
He Is Mine And I Have No Other is a book of secrets, and it burns with the sadness and starkness particular to lives forced into secrecy and silence. And yet there is, too, in this story a lucid and beautiful happiness, fragile though it may be; the happiness of being young, and in love, and of finding that love returned. Rebecca O'Connor captures vividly the small triumphs and catastrophes of being a teenage girl in rural Ireland, but in the further darkness to which she reaches is a truth for all generations -- BELINDA MCKEON, author of SOLACE and TENDER
Captures, with uncanny precision, the sheer ferociousness of teenage desire . . . An evocative, atmospheric and thought-provoking read * * Irish Independent on Sunday * *
Evocative of Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding and Maura Laverty's glorious, long out of print, Never No More, Rebecca O'Connor's debut novel is vivid, authentic and compelling and may be the truest depiction of Irish rural girlhood since Edna O'Brien's Girl With Green Eyes. For that it is, and a lot more besides. What a treat it is to be introduced to such a genuine, compassionately humorous and profoundly tender voice -- PATRICK McCABE, Booker-shortlisted author of BREAKFAST ON PLUTO and THE BUTCHER BOY
God, this book is brilliant. It sends you, helter-skelter, back to life as a fifteen-year-old and all the intensity of that age. A love story set against an undercurrent of untold tragedy. Vivid and utterly compelling, this book had me torn between racing on and stopping to marvel at beautifully crafted lines -- JESS KIDD, author of HIMSELF and THE HOARDER
I devoured He Is Mine and I Have No Other in a day, immediately caught up in O'Connor's vividly realised world. The intensity of relationships and shifting loyalties is brilliantly captured as the teenage protagonist, Lani Devine, wrestles with family life, friendship and first love. O'Connor perfectly evokes the passion, uncertainties and awkward misunderstandings of teen love. He Is Mine and I Have No Other is a great achievement and my only complaint is that I wanted more! -- EVER DUNDAS, author of GOBLIN, winner of the Saltire First Book Award 2017
A haunting novel that cuts right into the delicate and dangerous world of the adolescent. Sometimes frightening, often funny, but never a word less than a true work of art -- CHRISTINE DWYER HICKEY, author of TATTY and THE COLD EYE OF HEAVEN
