Oona

In Alice Lyons’ implosive first novel, Oona, child of firstgeneration American migrants, lives in an affluent New Jersey suburb where conspicuous consumption and white privilege prevail. A silence surrounding death extends to the family home where Oona’s mother lies dying of cancer. As her inner life goes into shutdown, Oona has her first encounters with sex, drugs and other adolescent rites of passage. What does a voice alienated from itself sound like? How can the creative process be truthfully represented? In this remarkable debut, a female character’s fraught journey into adulthood is rendered in vivid colour. Oona, the emergent artist, encounters the physical world and the materials of her craft, engaging with her losses through Ireland’s culture and landscape. As boom turns to bust, Oona’s story, articulated without the letter ‘o’, inhabits a world of fracture and false promise, conveyed by elision yet miraculously made whole and real in the telling.