Description

One winter morning on an ordinary day in contemporary Dublin, an ordinary middle-class woman wakes up in her ordinary suburban home. Her husband is next to her in bed, her teenage children sleeping nearby.

Without thinking much about it, she walks out the front door and never comes back.

She travels first by car, then train, then ferry. Along the way, she finds herself in service stations and shopping centres, hotel bars and hairdressers – and in the beds of strange men.

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.

From one of Ireland’s most provocative and admired writers, this is a story of rage and reckoning, joy and transformation.

Publisher Review

Cathy Sweeney is a 21st century Kafka, an Irish Ernaux. Breakdown is so vivid, so formally dazzling, and so startling. As with only the very, very best books, you will experience the world afresh having read this. It is a hugely important novel for the 21st century -- Danny Denton, author of THE EARLIE KING & THE KID IN YELLOW A truthful and compassionate account of contemporary of marriage and motherhood that is as poignant as it is unsettling. Long after reading, Breakdown lingers in the mind -- Margaret Meyer, author of THE WITCHING TIDE Cathy Sweeney is one of the most original writers at work today, and Breakdown is a novel of at once spectacular reach and unforgettable intimacy. Her writing gleams throughout like a stone underwater -- Adrian Duncan, author of A SABBATICAL IN LIEPZIG Breakdown has an unflinching wisdom about the sacrifices we make to our integrity when we pretend at perfection, in marriage, in parenting, making a home. Sweeney's writing is starkly perceptive, brave and honest, challenging the universal fear of how easy it is to trip into free-fall and how hard it is to then go back -- Lily Dunn, author of SINS OF MY FATHER