BETHANY JOY DAWSON
Bethany Joy Dawson holds an MPhil in Creative Writing from Trinity College Dublin, and her debut novel, My Father’s House, was published in 2013. Familiar is her second novel. She is the curator of Upstream, an offering of weekly essays that map the landscape as she sees it – in literary, physical and spiritual ways.
Originally from Co. Down, she now lives in Sligo with her husband and three children.
CRITICAL ACCLAIM
… for FAMILIAR
An exquisitely written novel – every sentence is carefully observed, lyrical and deeply humane. Bethany Dawson writes with an acute understanding of what makes a human being human. Her writing is both painfully honest and simultaneously compassionate. This is a book which will gently
haunt you for many months to come.
Jan Carson, author of Few and Far Between
Familiar skilfully balances the tension between the need to belong and the desire to resist oppressive constraints. I was completely absorbed by these three generations of women who risk exclusion by confounding expectations and making the much more difficult choice to have faith in themselves by following their ‘greatest hunger’. Dawson’s sense of home and the body as sources of betrayal and redemption is keenly observed, with characters who are unexpectedly compassionate and generous.
Elaine Garvey, author of The Wardrobe Department
Bethany Joy Dawson writes to the marrow of family secrets and the pain passed down through generations. Nuanced, compassionate and haunting, Familiar finds redemption and forgiveness in those who have the least reason to give it. Beautifully written and impossible to put down.
Una Mannion, author of A Crooked Tree and Tell Me What I Am
A beguiling meditation on silence and the damage it can do, Familiar also portrays with power and originality the generational scars that notions of respectability can inflict. Against a particular kind of traditionalism, Bethany Joy Dawson’s three female characters are determined, in their different ways, to be radical, and to reach for the truth. A Northern Irish pastoral, sharply secretive and richly complicated in the way only such a pastoral can be.
Belinda McKeon, author of Solace and Tender
A motherless young woman, raised without religion or her own history, is suddenly given the gift – or curse – of both. Living in the ghosts of the women who came before her, Cora has to decide how much to recover, how much to accept and how much to reinvent. Familiar is a quietly bold exploration of the beauty and horrors of community, and the terrible betrayals of the self that it can engender.
Elske Rahill, author of An Unravelling
… for MY FATHER'S HOUSE
Dawson’s debut shows a steady hand and real patience as the plot carefully unravels. Each dynamic is meticulously drawn… Suspicious of easy framings of the past, the novel offers up something much more complex.
Caroline Magennis, The Irish Times
A literary debut filled with intriguing characters. Bethany Dawson is a name to watch.
Sue Leonard, The Irish Examiner
The family Dawson depicts is somehow every Irish family of a certain era, held together by its secrets, bound by its evasions, by a web of loyalties, only one of which is love. The story is a familiar one, reminiscent of John McGahern’s work. The writing is honed to a fine point and Dawson shows that she is a significant new voice.
Lorraine Courtney, Irish Independent