Excerpt from Saoirse by Charleen Hurtubise, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The Prize

Early October 1999

The front door is open and the full length of Daithí fills the frame. He leans against the doorjamb, soaking in the unexpected heat from the autumn sunshine. The mid-morning brightness splits the surface of the bay into shards of light below the house, dazzling Saoirse for a moment as she pulls the car between the gate piers, past the slate sign Daithí has fastened to the wall. Here, in their remote corner of Donegal, houses have no numbers, only names. Teach Cuan na Míolta Móra.

Eloise is slumped in her car seat; she has fallen asleep somewhere along the winding coast road. Saoirse can't bear to think of her youngest daughter's face when the public health nurse cooed, tickled her thighs, and then surprised her with an injection in the arm. The child had jumped at the sting, her bottom lip quivering. Eyes, soft and dark as her father's, filling with tears, looking at Saoirse as though she was the source of the betrayal, her own mother the cause of her now broken heart. She wept inconsolably as the nurse turned to her paperwork while Saoirse gathered the child in her arms, comforted her between sobs.

Saoirse pulls into a patch of shade at the end of the house, barely coming to a stop before reaching for her bag, rummaging for a sketchpad, a receipt—anything she might use to capture this moment, the light on Daithí's face. Something about his position reminds her of the first time she sketched him in the garden at the Byrnes' house. She fishes out a repurposed Altoids tin, prying open its lid, selecting a broken piece of charcoal—she finds an old bill in her bag, turns it over and blocks in the lines of his shoulders, his arms. It is not the first time she has considered painting a series using him as her sole subject, simply title the exhibition Daithí. Add it to the growing canvases of her daughters playing at the sea, climbing the rocks, placing their tiny hands in the crevices of the walls surrounding the house.

Whichever her next series, it will be a happier collection than the one she is due to install in the Raymond Frank Gallery in Dublin next week. A van collected the canvases days ago. She was happy to see it move off down the road, her dark period as she knows it, as though it is all behind her now.

She will follow the paintings up to Dublin in a day or two. Daithí will drop her into Sligo town to catch the train. Fiona, the curator, no longer trying to hide her irritation, is insisting the paintings have a descriptive title at the very least. Gan anim—without name—will not suffice.

"They speak for themselves," Saoirse has argued, borrowing the curator's own lingo. "You either connect with the work, or you don't." But this exhibition is different from all the others that have come before. The smaller galleries allowed her what they saw as the eccentricities of the artist, leaving her to her own devices. She is aware of the scale and prestige of this upcoming exhibition—but what she hadn't reckoned on was the scope of Fiona's ambitions, her plans to not only curate the work but also to document Saoirse's journey, to make a big deal of the trajectory that has brought her to this place most artists will only ever dream of reaching. Her resistance to this success, she fears, will bring its own suspicions.

Now Fiona has requested her sketchbooks to put on display, she will use them to write detailed descriptions for a catalogue in the absence of Saoirse's cooperation.

"There are no sketchbooks," Saoirse has lied. But she does, in fact, have books full of drawings, graphic depictions, like untold confessions, events that happened just outside the frame. She keeps them locked in a secret place. When this is all over, and the exhibition is dismantled, Saoirse envisions herself burning the sketchbooks. The past can haunt someone else now, she thinks, and turns her hand back to this drawing of Daithí, back to the things in her new life which can be named.

Excerpted from Saoirse by Charleen Hurtubise. Copyright © 2026 by Charleen Hurtubise. Excerpted by permission of Celadon. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.