The Alternatives

The four Flattery sisters, orphaned young after their parents fell from a cliff path in a gale, have built separate lives across Ireland, England, and America. Their eldest sister's sudden disappearance forces a reunion that reopens old wounds and exposes each sister's struggles with loss, purpose, and connection.

Olwen Flattery, a geologist and lecturer at the University of Galway, teaches first-year undergraduates about tectonic processes and the Anthropocene, the proposed geological epoch defined by human impact on Earth. Her lectures grow increasingly bleak as she dwells on the accelerating erasure of the surficial geologic record: the surface-level traces of soils, sediments, and landforms that climate change is destroying. When a jointly authored paper arguing this point is rejected by the journal Nature Geoscience, Olwen refuses to adapt or appeal. That evening, her partner, Jasper, a video editor whose wife died before Olwen entered his and his young sons' lives, urges her to fight the rejection, but she deflects. Late that night, unable to sleep, Olwen drinks gin and wanders the dark house. She reflects on raising her three younger sisters after their parents' deaths, thinking she has "done wonders." She goes to the garage and recognizes what she has come for: a way out.

The novel then introduces each remaining sister. Maeve Flattery, the second youngest, is a freelance chef living on a houseboat in London. Her Instagram cooking videos and cookbook series, Gourmet Cooking in Brexit Britain, have brought her a following. While catering a dinner at Sir Jeremy Charles's Notting Hill town house, she learns her publishers consider her forthcoming book on cooking from food bank basics "unacceptable." She privately appeals to Mrs. Charles for help: She needs to break her book contract, repay part of her advance, and find medical care for her youngest sister, Nell, who requires tests she cannot afford in America. Mrs. Charles offers a secluded mooring spot on the family's Newbury estate.

Nell Flattery, the youngest at 33, is an adjunct philosophy professor commuting between three Connecticut campuses. She has gradually lost all sensation in her feet up to her shins and cannot afford health insurance on her work visa. She swims regularly in Long Island Sound for equilibrium. Nell emailed Olwen about her worsening condition in a bid to draw her out; Olwen sent medication but revealed nothing of her whereabouts. Nell decides to take a sabbatical to find her sister.

Rhona Flattery, the second eldest at 37, is a political science professor at Trinity College Dublin and an expert on citizens' assemblies, democratic forums in which randomly selected citizens deliberate on public policy. She lives in a seafront home with her 11-month-old son, Leo, conceived during a night of MDMA at a conference in Lisbon; she has never identified the father. While Maeve and Nell trade ideas in an "Olwen Search Party" WhatsApp group, Rhona quietly asks a retired neighbor, Jim O'Rourke, a former EU Commissioner, to search land registries for any cash purchase in Olwen's name. Jim finds an Eircode, an Irish postal address, in County Leitrim. Rhona keeps this from her sisters.

Part Two opens with Olwen's bicycle journey from Galway to Leitrim. She cycles through dark country roads, camps in a megalithic tomb, and stops in Leitrim when saddle sores halt her. She rescues a sheep tangled in blackthorn and later visits the village pub in Kiltyclogher. The sheep's owner, Feidhlim, a teetotaling farmer, comes to thank her. Over games of cards, he assesses her situation and offers her a few acres on Sliabh Dúch, where an abandoned bungalow stands with running well water. Olwen accepts.

Months later, Maeve and Nell reunite at Dublin Airport, where Rhona intercepts them with Olwen's location and drives them to Leitrim. The narrative shifts into a dramatic, play-like format as they arrive at Olwen's renovated farmhouse. The reunion is fraught. Olwen tells her sisters she never asked anything of them and retreats to the barn. When she returns, a tense exchange unfolds. Olwen insists: "We're way past planning."

Rhona then reveals a secret she has held since she was barely 16: She ordered an autopsy on their parents. Blood tests showed their mother, Leonora, had stopped taking antimanic medication and started taking benzodiazepines. Olwen confirms she learned similar information from Leonora's doctor. Nell, who knew none of this, is stunned. Rhona maintains their mother's death was deliberate and their father's an act of desperate love: He reached for Leonora as she fell and fell himself. Olwen tells her sisters: "Ye're years too early."

Over the following days, the sisters settle into uneasy coexistence. At the local pub, they gather with Feidhlim; his wife, Sheila, who cleans at the nearby Health Centre; and Dan, the young barman. Feidhlim tells a story from the Troubles, the decades-long conflict in Northern Ireland: A young man once appeared at his farmhouse at midnight, asking to hide "car parts" from customs and saying he was "in a spot of bother." Rhona presents Nell with blood-test kits and announces she has arranged a neurologist appointment. Rhona also challenges Olwen to babysit Leo. When the baby eats a fistful of compost and Olwen panics but handles it, Rhona recognizes what she has long discerned: Olwen is not a danger to herself, simply exhausted from a lifetime of caregiving.

Nell stays behind with Olwen and draws her into honest conversation. Olwen admits the core of her crisis: The question "Do you have hope?" became unbearable. She could not calibrate how much truth to share. Once she knew Jasper's sons no longer needed her and her sisters were on their own paths, she found there was nowhere to look that was not covered in algae, blocking all light. Nell tells Olwen she can "go dark for a bit," but only briefly; then she must come back. Nell confesses that she left for America because the constant concern over her was suffocating, preventing her from thinking or being curious.

Maeve accompanies Rhona to Northern Ireland, where Rhona delivers a talk on citizens' assemblies and is offered a position chairing a cross-university research unit on participatory democracy. During the drive, Rhona admits she was absent from the childhood the others shared: "I had to sneak ahead, to lay down tracks, since the ones we had led off a cliff." Back in Leitrim, Nell walks one night to a border lake and enters the water. Dan arrives, sent by a panicked Olwen. Nell propositions him: one night, then she returns to America. Dan is torn, admitting he would try to keep her, like the humans in selkie folklore who hide the seal-woman's skin to prevent her leaving.

In the final chapter, Olwen excavates a pit for a concrete foundation on her land. The sisters' WhatsApp group buzzes with forward-looking plans: Maeve is developing a documentary series; Nell has booked passage on a transatlantic cruise ship in exchange for philosophy lectures. While Olwen works alone, a support timber gives way and 22 tons of crushed stone collapse into the pit, burying her to the chest. Her phone sits on the digger above, still connected. She tries Siri but cannot pronounce Feidhlim's name. As a light approaches, the novel ends with Olwen calling out to what she hopes is Sheila: "I'm in a spot of bother." The phrase echoes the smuggler's words from Feidhlim's story. It is Olwen's first real call for help, reaching toward the community she has been reluctantly building.