Jamie O’Neill stands apart from other kids his age in Emory, a fictional town in the west of Ireland. A lifelong reader of Edgar Allan Poe, he nevertheless favours the symmetries of mathematics over fiction, revering the work of the late Iranian Fields medallist Maryam Mirzakhani. On his first day at Christ’s College, the local all-boys secondary school, he knows exactly how many steps it will take him to walk there from home (2,816). And he wants to build a perpetual motion machine so that, by some complex logic that only he understands, he can reconnect with his mother who died giving birth to him.
Jamie is the singular centre of Elaine Feeney’s second novel – after As You Were, winner of the Kate O’Brien award in 2021 – though he shares the narrative with Tess Mahon, an additional needs teacher whose life is in the grip of the kind of chaos that Jamie abhors. Trying for a child on IVF, she finds herself increasingly estranged from her self-satisfied banker husband, Paul. She feels out of place, too, at Christ’s College, whose headmaster Father Faulks is fostering a culture of intolerance against anyone different. When she connects with Jamie, bullied on his first morning, it’s uncertain whether she is throwing him a lifeline or vice versa.
