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The Benefactors: Longlisted for the 2026 Women's Prize for Fiction

Wendy Erskine

8 Reviews

Rated 0

Ireland, Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

Loved by critics and readers: the major literary debut of 2025, now in a new paperback edition.

AN OBSERVER BEST DEBUT NOVEL 2025
SHORTLISTED FOR NOVEL OF THE YEAR AT THE AN POST IRISH BOOK AWARDS
LONGLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE

'What a joy it is to read'
Michael Magee, author of Close to Home

'I couldn't put this book down'
Sheena Patel, author of I'm A Fan

'Powerful, moving, compelling, utterly enthralling'
Jon McGregor, author of Reservoir 13

'A prodigiously talented author: funny and brutal by turns'
Guardian

'The style of Woolf but the heart of Dickens'
Sunday Times

'Vital reading'
Spectator
'I miss it already . . . What a beautiful, hilarious blast of brilliance'
Donal Ryan, author of Heart, Be at Peace

'A cast of characters so vividly drawn it feels like you've known them all your life'
Colin Walsh, author of Kala

Misty thought of them as friends, the three local boys from wealthy homes. Until upstairs at a house party an act of violence takes place, with lines drawn and repercussions for them all. On her side, Misty has her devoted father Boogie, and the formidable matriarch Nan D. On theirs, the boys have their mothers - Frankie, Bronagh and Miriam will use the considerable power at their disposal to protect their own children.

And all the while, anonymous voices across the city confide in us, sometimes offering us another perspective on what has happened, but more often telling their own stories - inviting us briefly into lives shaped by money and class, by family and love.

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Praise for The Benefactors: Longlisted for the 2026 Women's Prize for Fiction

  • This Belfast novel has the style of Woolf but the heart of Dickens . . . Erskine - a gifted short story writer who has been longlisted for the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award - deploys a style closer to Virginia Woolf than to HBO, delivering scattershot glimpses of events through the eyes of a broad cast of characters . . . for all the formal subtlety and fragmentation of this impressive novel, then, it is amazing to see there is such a warmly conventional heart beating beneath the Woolfian multiple perspectives and the deliberate haziness with which Erskine depicts the novel's central act of class-based injustice - Sunday Times

  • Wendy Erskine's first novel arrives after two collections that stake her claim to be the most talented Irish short story writer to emerge from either side of the border in the past decade . . . the voice is intimate and flexible, inviting us to ridicule a character's failings one minute and understand them the next, offering and then resisting caricature. Through the interplay with the first-person vignettes we gain a panorama of character that includes what these people no longer know about themselves . . . The reader will come away from the book with a sense of a writer of an unrivalled range of imaginative empathy, and of a city teeming with joy and sadness. - Financial Times

  • So fresh, so sharp, so wry, so alive; so much contemporary fiction feels flat and fake in comparison. In all of its glorious polyphony, The Benefactors brims with humanity. It's got snap, it's got sparkle, it's got soul . . . I adored it.

  • The Benefactors is a novel as perfectly pitched, surefooted, and charged with feeling as her gleaming, precise stories

  • A powerful, moving, compelling, utterly enthralling debut novel from the excellent Wendy Erskine . . . We're all better off for being able to read a novel as rich as this

  • One of the best books of the year - Belfast Telegraph

  • A truly remarkable novel - The Benefactors is both intimate and panoramic, full of clear-eyed compassion and wry wit, and with a cast of characters so vividly drawn it feels like you've known them all your life. This is powerful, masterful storytelling by one of the most exciting writers at work today

  • Wendy Erskine flourishes her captivating style in The Benefactors, with a depth of insight which at times feels like epiphany . . . An essential novel, and Wendy Erskine an essential novelist. It is an inspired testament to survival - I was incredibly moved by it.

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