Picador Presents: Louise Hegarty, Sarah Moss & Gráinne O’Hare

Fair Play by Louise Hegarty is a murder mystery. It is a story about love. Or is it?… Abigail and her brother Benjamin have always been close. To celebrate his birthday, Abigail hires a grand old house and gathers their friends together for a murder mystery party. As the night goes on, they drink too much and play games. Relationships are forged, consolidated or frayed. Someone kisses someone they shouldn’t, someone else’s heart is broken. In the morning, everyone wakes up – except Benjamin. Suddenly everything is not quite what it seems. An eminent detective arrives determined to find Benjamin’s killer. The house now has a butler, a gardener and a housekeeper. This is a locked-room mystery, and everyone is a suspect. As Abigail attempts to fathom her brother’s unexpected death in a world that has been turned upside down, she begins to wonder whether perhaps the true mystery might have been his life… Fair Play is the puzzle-box story of two competing tales that brilliantly lay bare the real truth of life – the terrifying mystery of grief.

‘Ripeness, not readiness, is all. Life has no form, you don’t get to choose.’ Ripeness is the extraordinary new novel from Sarah Moss. It is the 60s and, just out of school, Edith finds herself travelling to rural Italy. She has been sent by her mother with strict instructions: to see her sister, ballet dancer Lydia, through the final weeks of her pregnancy, help at the birth and then make a phone call which will seal this baby’s fate, and his mother’s. Decades later, happily divorced and newly energized, Edith is living a life of contentment and comfort in Ireland. When her best friend Maebh receives a call from an American man claiming to be her brother, Maebh must decide if she will meet him, and she asks Edith for help. Ripeness is a sweeping, engrossing novel about familial love and the communities we create, about migration and new beginnings, and about what it is to have somewhere to belong.

Thirst Trap by Gráinne O’Hare is a funny and bittersweet story about the messy reality of friendship. It’s a wildly original and brilliantly assured debut set in modern Belfast: full of the pain, joy and bad decisions arising from young friendship, grief and bad house shares. Maggie, Harley and Róise have spent their twenties careering around the bars of Belfast with riotous abandon, the wine cheap and the memories priceless. However, the three of them used to be four; and now, one year on from a tragic accident, Maggie, Harley and Róise are still shaken by the sudden death of their best friend Lydia. Struggling to process their loss and afraid to let go of the home and the life they shared together, the three women each find the nights becoming wilder and the days more full of regret. As Maggie, Harley and Róise spiral into chaos, the memory of their last, worst fight with Lydia hangs heavy and unspoken over their heads. Their house is crumbling around them and the city that raised them seems full of ghosts, as the three of them try to piece themselves back together. Thirst Trap is a brilliant and beautiful page-turner of a novel; a bittersweet, bitingly funny, at times painfully relatable story about the friendships that endure through the very best and the very worst of times.

This event is supported by Picador