Soldier Sailor: 'One of the finest novels published this year' The Sunday Times

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The job now is to reflect on middle age and mortality. We know we are going to die, it’s a very unpleasant piece of information. Are we in denial? My cousin died at 39, one of the school mums died at 37, both cancer. Christine was one of the infancy infantry and we watched her slowly die, that’s where the whole warrior thing comes from. She did the whole school run till she couldn’t manage the steps, then she’d wait at the top because she didn’t want to say goodbye. It was terrible. You have a human imagination and you try to shape those feelings into a story. We will die, we will lose each other. How do we accept that? I think that’s what it is, you don’t know what you’re writing or why till later.” Soldier Sailor is a welcome return by Claire Kilroy, her first novel in 10 years. It captures the raw, tumultuous emotions of a new mother as her marriage suffers and she struggles with questions of love, autonomy and creativity.'

Ugaz’s case is all too familiar in Peru, where powerful groups regularly use the courts to silence journalists by fabricating criminal allegations against them.’ We found ourselves in front of the spinning carousel, waiting for it to stop. A little girl was already on board. The etiquette surrounding communal rides was awkward at best. The wheel had to be dragged to a halt to allow you to board, then all the sorrys and say thank yous to the other mother and child. ‘I don’t want the little boy,’ the little girl said to her mother, who told her to be nice. MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window)

Caster Semenya’s The Race to Be Myself made me gasp

The husband is almost comically enraging in his weaponised incompetence, yet in many ways entirely normal and believable – which only makes him more maddening. When she talks about missing work and feeling overwhelmed with parenting duties, he responds, "So get up earlier. Get up at five." Her photos of their son elicit just a smiley face, no further expression of love or encouragement.

He, the son, is Sailor, she, the tiger spirited mother is Soldier who will die to protect him but in the early exhausting, confusing days of motherhood she needs to be ‘at ease’. The two are joined by an everlasting bond but the strain of what she’s lost especially in her former working life identity and in her marriage, leads to a virtual breakdown. Can she return to the woman she used to be especially once she meets an old friend both united in parenthood? The early years of motherhood are ironically a barren part of the fictional landscape, with precious few examples that might have opened Kilroy’s eyes to what lay ahead of her. No longer. With mordant wit and acute, astute observations, she charts a world familiar to any parent yet freshly painted. In our day, corporal punishment was legal. Did you know that? If we didn’t do what we were told, they hit us.’ The writing is so powerful that you feel every emotion our MC experiences. There is a poetic flow to this original story of the raw, tumultuous emotions of a new mother who is struggling with the changes in her life. We see her begin to resent her husband because he still has his freedom "but that he was free to roam in my world, which we should now call his world, or perhaps the world, an adult place from which I've been banished." Plus there are no adult males in here. Have you noticed that? Not even a grandad (for there were several older women). When it comes to unpaid labour, where are the men? It’s gender apartheid in here.’Well, Sailor. Here we are once more, you and me in one another's arms. The Earth rotates beneath us and all is well, for now. What brought the book down from a 3 to a 2-star rating was the general negative picture the novel paints of men. I see this often in feminist novels, where attempt to uplift a woman, or critiques of one individual man cross the line into generalized man-hate. I’m very tired of that trope. Soldiers husband clearly isn’t the picture-perfect family-husband and deserved some criticism for that, but we didn’t need to generalize this into a guilt-trip directed at all men. From constant references to “the mans-world” out there, to quips about “only a man being able to design a car-seat with straps to free their hands from the baby”, to passive aggressive advise directed to her (infant!) boy about how to respect women when he’s grown. It crossed a line from righteous annoyance to wallowing in victimhood for me. She cherishes the prospect of sharing precious years with her child in the future before the ravages of age take their toll on both of them. But also with torment and wonder if her love for her son is worth the anguish. We see her becoming a mama bear who would kill anybody, including herself to protect this tiny human, we see her feeling the over whelming love that consumes and confuses new mothers! Soldier Sailor, the new novel by Irish writer Claire Kilroy, is all about voice. And what a voice it is!

Wow, this was intense. I'll never experience motherhood, but after reading this novel I'm quite relieved about that fact. Claire Kilroy imagines it all as psychological horror in this raw and visceral tale. That is unfortunately how society was set up in Ireland. There was no paternity leave. Alan didn’t get a day off work. There is now two weeks but low take-up, I think paternity leave should be compulsory, parental leave should be shared so it becomes a joint endeavour. I asked Sebastian Barry’s wife: did he help out? She said yes, 50:50. I think you can see that in his work. Someone who has devoted time to equality. The mother narrating the story is the Soldier of the title, knee-deep in the trenches and operating purely in survival mode, and Sailor is her boy child. I like that their actual names are withheld; this provides them with a universality that suggests that their experience is not unique to them but a common one. There are times when it read a little like a newspaper column told by a hapless individual - a motherhood version of Tim Dowling or Nicholas Lazard - Bridget Jones but with Soldier’s husband playing Daniel and cheating with golf (swapped from her own husband's cycling) and life outside of the house in general, full of highly quotable lines:Our love was a song, I thought. I couldn't quite remember how the song went but I couldn't quite forget it either. Phrases of melody kept drifting past. I strained to catch them but in straining, lost them." With this in mind I started to upgrade my game. I am not there yet, but almost I think. But reading this novel on motherhood and mental load reminded me that there are still a lot of things that are putting too much weight on -especially- the mother. The Sailor of the title is the baby, while Soldier is the mother, one of the ‘infancy infantry’ performing the thankless daily drill of raising the next generation, ‘struggling to contain your screams while struggling to contain my own’