Caoilinn Hughes - The Wild Laughter

PRAISE FOR THE WILD LAUGHTER

Named a Most Anticipated Title for 2020 by

the Financial Times, the Irish Times & RT

I loved this book. So funny and bleak. I loved the madness, the tone, the ending, the realisation, The Third Policeman charge of the whole thing.

Roddy Doyle, Booker prize-winning author of Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

The prose has extraordinary velocity. A book of wicked intelligence and tender heart.

Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers

Caoilinn Hughes is a writer of immense ability and vitalityshes a true natural, with the talent to match her ambition.

Kevin Barry, author of Night Boat to Tangier

A memorable, insightful portrait of a complex family in an equally complex economic and emotional situation. Caoilinn Hughes gets the balance just right: the pathos is real but never heavy-handed; the humour is black but never mean-spirited. The Wild Laughter succeeds on all levels.

Patrick deWitt, author of The Sisters Brothers

The Wild Laughter is painfully smart, comically brilliant and boldly subversive. Hughes makes her subject matter entirely her own while providing a lacerating look at the world we live in.

Olivia Sudjic, author of Sympathy

The Wild Laughter is a raucously intelligent, tough and tender black comedy written in jaggedly beautiful prose and confirms Caoilinn Hughes as a restlessly inventive, exciting new voice in Irish literature.

Colin Barrett, author of Young Skins, winner of the Guardian First Book Award

What a profound, much needed, urgent novel. The Wild Laughter is dark and beautiful, and touches the heart of what deep suffering our political systems have brought upon the world, but seen in that clearest wayintimately, microscopically, through family. The myriad ways they can love, hurt and betray one another So well done.

Fatima Bhutto, author of The Runaways

The Wild Laughter is a stunning piece of writing. Hughes sentences are so well-crafted I read many of them several times and discovered fresh layers with each read. Her dialogue is razor sharp and shot through with Beckett-esque black humour. The characters are perfectly drawn. A strong and early contender for Irish novel of the year.

Jan Carson, author of The Fire Starters

Set in the aftermath of the Celtic Tiger, [The Wild Laughter] is a dark comedy on euthanasia.

Irish Times, Most Anticipated Titles 2020

Caoilinn Hughes is a massive talent.

Anthony Doerr, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All the Light We Cannot See

From the first arresting paragraph of The Wild Laughter, Caoilinn Hughes enthrals us on a journey through contemporary Ireland, one that even the most far-flung reader will find delightful, in all of its hilarity, peculiarity and states of flux.

Elnathan John, author of Born on a Tuesday

This novel will take its rightful place among the best of international writing today.

Mary Burnham, bookseller for Dubray

PRAISE FOR ORCHID & THE WASP

Named a Best Book of the Year by Cosmopolitan, Sunday Independent, Hot Press, Irish Independent, RT & Sunday Business Post

Winner of the Collyer Bristow Prize 2019

Shortlisted for the Hearst Big Book Awards 2019

Shortlisted for the Butler Literary Award 2018

Longlisted for the Authors Club Best First Novel Award 2018

Longlisted for the International DUBLIN Literary Award 2020

A remarkable, propulsive debut No precis can adequately convey the novels startling, impressionistic prose, nor its corrosive humour. Jewels of observation glitter amid the earthy gags. Exuberant it zings with energy, ambition and daring.

Times Literary Supplement

Caoilinn Hughes is the real thingan urgent, funny, painstaking and heartfelt writer. Orchid & the Wasp is a startling debut full of the moral complexity, grief and strange bewilderments of humanity. As the world spins ever more quickly in response to the demands of grifters, parasites and liars, this book offers a troubling, beautiful and wise response.

A. L. Kennedy, Costa Prize-winning author of Day and Serious Sweet

Orchid & the Wasp is an ambitious, richly inventive and highly entertaining account of the way we live now. Caoilinn Hughes writes with authority and insight, and her novel is as up-to-date as tomorrows financial-page headlines.

John Banville, Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Sea

Caoilinn Hughess highly ambitious fiction debut contains multitudes Kick-ass, whip-smart and with a tongue like a catapult, Gael belongs to a venerable tradition of feisty heroines Some serious intellectual themes are explored: the crisis of late capitalism; the redemptive power of art and love; free expression in sexual matters; and much else besides. But maybe most strikingly, Gael Foess makes a telling contribution to the unlikeable female narrator debate Readers are going to love her.

Sunday Times

Orchid & the Wasp is making waves because it is fiercely bright and moves like a bullet train.

Sebastian Barry, bestselling author of Days Without End, for the Irish Times

A gem of a novel about the way we live now.

Elle

You wont forget Gael Foess.

NPR.org

A winning debut novel Hughes, a poet, touches the prose with a comic wand Orchid & the Wasp delivers a fantasy of competence, the kind that is in dialogue, if not always complete agreement, with morality.

The New Yorker

A razor-sharp wit and an astonishing psychological and emotional perceptiveness combine to yield uncommonly rich portraiture in this bracing book by a deadly talented writer, in prose so refined one slows to savour each beautifully unfolding sentence. Unsentimental, yet sneakily moving and given to surprising bouts of joy, Orchid & the Wasp becomes a referendum on the resiliency of selflessness in a contemporary world steeped in the logic of ambitious self-advancement.

Matthew Thomas, New York Times-bestselling author of We Are Not Ourselves

for Sen, for Ailbhe

The night the Chief died, I lost my father and the country lost a battle it wouldnt confess to be fighting. For the no-collared, labouring class. For the decent, dependable patriarch. For right of entry from the field into the garden.

Jurors were appointed to gauge the casualty. They didnt wear black. Dont they know black is flattering? The truth isnt. They kept safe and silent. I didnt. When is a confession an absolution and when is it a sentencing, Id like to find out. I suppose theres only one outcome for souls like usheavy-going souls the like of mine and the long-lost Chiefsand not a good one.

But Ill lay it on the line, if only to remind the People of who they are: a far cry from neutral judicial equipment. Determining the depth of rot thats blackening the surface cant always be left to deities or legislatorssometimes whats needed is to tie a string around the tooth and shut the door lively.

He was a bright young thing. My brother, Cormac. His mind was a luxury. The face was rationed, it must be said, but theres not a body with everything. Part t-rex, part pelican. Picture that menace of features! Close-eyed, limb-chinned, skin thick as the red carpet he imagined laid down beneath his wellies. Tall as the door he expected to be let in. When he was twelve, he looked twenty. The mind was ahead too, as I said. The odd girl went in for such a harrow of a fella (the odd girl and not the even) on account of his brains and chesty conduct. Not that he was liberal with his cleverness. But there was the atmosphere of it, knowing at any moment something youd say would be turned inside out like a childs eyelid to traumatise you, to show you the violence behind it that you never meant, or maybe you did.