“Nights like this, she knows this is real, she’s not imagining it. The fear is bright, animal, sure. Pure blue at the heart of a flame.”
“But right now, there’s no space for stories.”
Rounding out my Booker predictions for the weekend is Roisín O’Donnell’s debut novel, Nesting (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill 2025 – true story – I used to intern at Algonquin back in 2002.) I listed Nesting not in my original 13 predicted selections but in an honorable mention section. Having read it – I think I’d pulled it over to the 13 (I keep going back and forth between this and Confessions.)
Ciara Fay’s husband is manipulative, controlling, and abusive. As she apologetically explains, he doesn’t hit her – as if she should be grateful the abuse isn’t worse. He may not hit her, but there’s intimidation, financial abuse, isolation, and sexual abuse. She spends her time walking on eggshells, barely daring to breathe. Nights are worse. One day, she decides she cannot take it anymore. In a split-second decision, she drives off with her two kids, their passports, and an armload of clothes.
The obsessive calls and texts start. O’Donnell masterfully showing the manipulation in the simple text messages. Ciara calls him, has a reasonable conversation about spending a few days with her mother in England, and spends much of the little money she’s squirreled away from him on plane tickets. When she arrives at the airport, she learns he’s put a hold on the passports – Ciara and her daughters are grounded at a crossroads between Ryan’s control and Ciara’s resilience and strength.
What follows is a year of continued attempts at control and manipulation, of wielding custody and the court system as a weapon, of forcing himself back into her life and refusing to pay support. Of note, he “saves” a nest of fledging crows and uses to them in an attempt to bring her home. Because, as he stresses, she knows how to take care of them. There’s a push and pull, a wound constantly being picked at, as Ciara – having learned she’s pregnant – begins to find herself and makes strides in breaking away.
Nesting sinks its claws in you, pulling you in like a car wreck or a TruCrime podcast, your fingers clenched in the hopes that Ciara doesn’t become a statistic. You’re tethered. Like a captive crow. Or woman.
Read this book.
A Girl Named Tommi 