Himself
Blending strange kindnesses, casual violence and buried secrets: an unforgettable debut from a dark new voice in Irish fiction
When Mahony returns to Mulderrig, a speck of a place on Ireland’s west coast, he brings only a photograph of his long-lost mother and a determination to do battle with the village’s lies.
His arrival causes cheeks to flush and arms to fold in disapproval. No one in the village - living or dead - will tell what happened to the teenage mother who abandoned him as a baby, despite Mahony's certainty that more than one of them has answers.
Between Mulderrig’s sly priest, its pitiless nurse and the caustic elderly actress throwing herself into her final village play, this beautiful and darkly comic debut novel creates an unforgettable world of mystery, bloody violence and buried secrets.
Jess Kidd
Jess Kidd’s writing dances on the edges of the seen and unseen, where the world of the living collides with the spectral. With a flair for blending the supernatural with vivid, character-driven narratives, Jess invites readers into hauntingly beautiful worlds where the past never quite lets go and the dead aren’t always silent.
Born in London and raised in County Mayo, Ireland, Jess’s love for storytelling began early, nurtured by a family steeped in rich folklore and Irish myth. But it was her own fascination with the liminal—those in-between spaces of life and death—that truly shaped her voice as a writer. This enchantment with the ghostly and the mysterious can be felt in her debut novel, Himself, which received critical acclaim and earned her a place among the brightest voices in contemporary fiction.
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