I couldn’t resist Thirst Trap given how many debuts from young Irish women have hit the spot for me in recent years. Gráinne O’Hare’s novel is about three friends on the cusp of thirty living in the same house they shared with a fourth, killed in a car accident a year before.
‘Lidl,’ Cate said, almost wistfully, as if Maggie had mentioned an exotic country she’d visited during her gap year. ‘Best wine.’
Harley, Róise, Maggie and Lydia shared a history that went back decades. Lydia had been the grown-up, working in a corporate job, caring, considerate and dependable. Her death was devastating, all the more so as the housemates were caught up in the fallout of a betrayal which saw some not speaking to her. A year later, Róise is still furious, Harley even more chaotic and Maggie’s panic attacks have become worse while the house is falling down around their ears. Something needs to be done but none of them seems able to find a way out until, finally, their hands are forced.
At the time, Harley did not even really know what condoms were, imagining then to be made from some kind of waterproof material similar to a cagoule.
Despite the death of a close friend at the heart of this late coming-of-age novel, O’Hare’s narrative is full of an affectionate humour for these three young women already stuck in the life they were living as students before Lydia’s accident. Each of them is dealing – or failing to deal – with the aftermath in their own, self-destructive way: Harley lurches from bed to bed, fuelled by a cocktail of drink and drugs; Róise seethes in her room, writing off a promising new relationship as just sex while Maggie still jumps to the tune of an old student lover who persistently refers to her as a ‘friend’. O’Hare neatly takes her characters from the birthday of her novel’s opening chapter to another in a satisfying wrap-up at the novel’s end. Her book deals with the overwhelming grief at the sudden loss of a friend at a young age well, resisting the maudlin, while engaging sympathy for her characters. Not one to shout about from the rooftops but I enjoyed it.
Picador Books: London 9781035046195 288 pages Hardback (Read via NetGalley)
