BookBrowse Reviews Saoirse by Charleen Hurtubise

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A young American woman moves to Ireland with a stolen passport to escape her traumatic upbringing, but attention from a prestigious art prize threatens to unravel her secrets.

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In Saoirse, our titular protagonist's past is shown to the reader in fragments. Born Sarah Roy to a drug-addicted mother and an unknown father, and rechristened Sarah Gagneux when her mother marries, she spends her childhood in Michigan forced to engage in criminal acts by her abusive stepfather. At eighteen, when Sarah meets an Irish expat who shares her first name, and to whom she bears a resemblance, she sees a ticket to a new life in the form of this other Sarah's passport. On the plane to Ireland, she meets Paul Byrne, an outgoing boy who invites Sarah into his family home, despite the fact that she has told him nothing about her life or circumstances. Paul and his family are at once aloof and overbearing, but without any other options available to her, she spends her days in Paul's sister's room sketching and painting, trying to make sense of her trauma through her art.

When Sarah becomes pregnant with Paul's child and is unable to leave the country with her expired, stolen passport to get an abortion (as the procedure is still illegal in Ireland in the 1990s when this part of the story takes place), she is trapped. She finds some solace in meeting Dáithí (pronounced Dah-hee), a kindly builder who renames her Saoirse (pronounced Sear-sha), an Irish name meaning freedom—but as she tries to move forward and create a future with Dáithí, she feels the lies and secrecy from her past closing in on her. When Saoirse is awarded a prestigious art prize, the spotlight falls on her, threatening to unravel the life she has built in her new community.

Laced with trauma and tenderness, Saoirse is a remarkable feat of storytelling that spans decades and continents but never feels overwhelming or undercooked. It's a complex work, tackling themes of memory, reinvention, community, abuse, and love, but for all its twists and turns, its central thesis lies in its title: Saoirse, or freedom. As our protagonist boards her flight to her new life and eventually sheds her American identity and morphs from Sarah to Saoirse, the irony is baked in: she is free from her criminal past, but falls into a new set of entrapments as a woman living in conservative Irish society (see Beyond the Book). Not only is she unable to get an abortion, but she knows that if she agrees to marry Paul, which would legitimize her as an Irish citizen, she would be unable to legally divorce him. The Irish setting, whose landscape is rendered vividly by Hurtubise's descriptive prose, is integral to understanding the novel as a whole, as it speaks not only of Saoirse, but of all the women who have fought for their freedom and survival.

Despite its complex and layered plot, Saoirse is a slow-moving, character-driven novel, focused on the internal life of its protagonist, but it's gripping as well. It is assembled almost like a puzzle—the full picture of Saoirse's life doesn't fall into place until the very end, and it rewards the reader for sticking with it in an emotionally fulfilling climax. But the beauty of this novel is more in the details, which are felt acutely by the reader as they are revealed. The fear felt growing up in an abusive home; the oppressive atmosphere of the Byrne household; the intensity of Saoirse's emotional connection with Dáithí; the yearning for stability—all of it feels real and immediate, and the longer Saoirse goes without confiding in Dáithí about her past, the more dread, inevitability, and doubt creep in. Is it possible to form a real connection when you're withholding a part of yourself? Can we ever really be free to move forward from the things we've done? Saoirse asks all of this while taking the reader on a remarkable, unpredictable journey.

This review first ran in the February 25, 2026 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.