Night Feeding

‘This is an exquisite book; uncanny, inventive and utterly human. Elske Rahill is arguably the most talented writer working in Ireland today’ Louise Kennedy, author of Trespasses

Laura is in Paris with her husband Austin. A year after a terrible, life-altering loss, she is still numb, experiencing the world at a remove.

But now there is a new crisis: a rapidly expanding international pandemic and lockdown. Unable to get back to Ireland, Laura and Austin head to a neglected château in the Cevennes, the property of Austin’s old family friends. But their new home is anything but a refuge. The house is strange; shadows slither and crawl when the lights are out, and there is talk of a mysterious cult in the commune just up the road.

When the disappearance of a neighbour puts a newly motherless child in their care, Laura and Austin are driven to greater acts of desperation. And when their host at last arrives in the dead of night, Laura finds herself sucked into a terrifying undertow of obsession, violence - and rebirth.

A terrifying confrontation of the maternal and the monstrous, the terror of loss and the power of death, Night Feeding is at once eerie and visceral, revelatory and depraved, seductive and disturbing - and marks the arrival of a major new talent.