Description

By (author) Erskine, Wendy

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Loved by critics and readers: the major literary debut of 2025, now in a new paperback edition.

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AN OBSERVER BEST DEBUT NOVEL 2025
SHORTLISTED FOR NOVEL OF THE YEAR AT THE AN POST IRISH BOOK AWARDS
LONGLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE

”What a joy it is to read”

Michael Magee, author of Close to Home

”I couldn”t put this book down”

Sheena Patel, author of I”m A Fan

”Powerful, moving, compelling, utterly enthralling”

Jon McGregor, author of Reservoir 13

”A prodigiously talented author: funny and brutal by turns”

Guardian

”The style of Woolf but the heart of Dickens”

Sunday Times

”Vital reading”

Spectator

”I miss it already . . . What a beautiful, hilarious blast of brilliance”

Donal Ryan, author of Heart, Be at Peace

”A cast of characters so vividly drawn it feels like you”ve known them all your life”

Colin Walsh, author of Kala

Meet Frankie, Miriam and Bronagh: three very different women from Belfast, but all mothers to eighteen-year-old boys.

Gorgeous Frankie, now married to a wealthy, older man, grew up in care. Miriam has recently lost her beloved husband Kahlil in ambiguous circumstances. Bronagh, the CEO of a children”s services charity, loves celebrity and prestige. When their sons are accused of sexually assaulting a friend, Misty Johnston, they”ll come together to protect their children, leveraging all the powers they possess. But on her side, Misty has the formidable matriarch, Nan D, and her father, taxi-driver Boogie: an alliance not so easily dismissed.

Brutal, tender and rigorously intelligent, The Benefactors is a daring, multi-voice presentation of modern-day Northern Ireland. It is also very funny.

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Riveting . . .
a polyphonic drama of money and class . . . Erskine”s eye for detail keeps us rapt

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This Belfast novel has
the style of Woolf but the heart of Dickens. . . Erskine – a gifted short story writer who has been longlisted for the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award – deploys a style closer to Virginia Woolf than to HBO, delivering scattershot glimpses of events through the eyes of a broad cast of characters . . . for all the formal subtlety and fragmentation of this impressive novel, then,
it is amazing to see there is such a warmly conventional heart beating beneath the Woolfian multiple perspectives and the deliberate haziness with which Erskine depicts the novel”s central act of class-based injustice

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This polyphonic portrait of class, power and social exclusion in Northern Ireland – the debut novel from an award-winning short story writer – is centred on the assault of a teenage girl, and the reactions of the boys” parents.
Erskine is a nimble, prodigiously talented author: funny and brutal by turns, with an extraordinary immediacy.

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Sparklingly polyphonic . . . The Benefactors might sound like one of those ripped-from-the-headlines, state-of-the-young-people, how-would-you-feel-if-this-happened-to-you sort of novels that publishers try to sell to book clubs – the sort of novel that is supposed to provoke a meaningful discussion about “issues”. (Side-note: a good novel is itself a meaningful discussion of “issues”, aka the varieties of human experience.)
But the effect of Erskine”s polyphonic method is to undermine op-ed simplicities, to insist on complexity. As one of her anonymous voices puts it, “no one should presume anything at any point about anybody” . . .
magnificently enigmatic, persu