In four US states, homebuyers have a legal right to know if a property is haunted. I should know: I’m from one of them. In Ireland, no such laws exist. Whether that indicates a country with too many hauntings to regulate—or too few to bother—is an open question.
Neither Gráinne O’Hare’s Thirst Trap nor Caragh Maxwell’s Sugartown feature literal ghosts. And yet, at a time when the prospect of homeownership in contemporary Ireland seems incredibly grim, these books are filled with spectres: of the futures denied to their protagonists and the pasts that they stand to inherit.
Thirst Trap and Sugartown are memorable, sharp, realist novels about young Irish womanhood, and both authors have drawn comparisons to Sally Rooney, Dolly Alderton, and Lena Dunham. Like other products of the Millennial imagination, their books have been covered as studies in protracted adolescence, underemployment, and swipe-supported intimacy, answers to a question oft-repeated in op-eds: without access to the so-called ‘traditional markers’ of adulthood—spouses, houses, and steady paychecks—how will young people shape their lives? Though they have much to say on the topic, focusing too narrowly on this framing risks missing what makes them so interesting: their careful attention to the reckoning between what is possible and what is probable.
Maxwell and O’Hare’s dispatches from the cross-border precariat capture the unique paralysis of trying to inhabit the present while pinned beneath the weight of ‘lost futures’, to use Mark Fisher’s term. While both works are structured as coming-of-age stories, their protagonists’ momentum is slowed by a hauntological drag, a fixation on ‘metaphorical ghosts’ and the traces of foreclosed possibilities that holds them back even as they attempt to move forward.
In Thirst Trap, set in Belfast, one of these ghosts has a name: Lydia. The novel begins a year after her death, with her three best friends—Róise, Harley, and Maggie—mired in grief. The trio has carefully preserved Lydia’s empty bedroom, whose only inhabitants include a small population of fungi and an unwanted pet rabbit. To acknowledge their hardship, their landlord has reduced their rent, but even this accommodation is temporary—the flat is literally falling apart. Though the friends face their issues with a surplus of good humour, something is rotten in this state of sorority, and the book tells a compelling story of the volatile romances, simmering addictions, and dead-end jobs that threaten to unravel the threads holding them together. O’Hare chooses to focus less on the ghosts of the capital-T Troubles and more on the grinding malaise of high rents and low wages.
The spectres of Sugartown are subtler but no less possessing. In this novel, twentysomething Saoirse Maher has returned to her hometown in the Irish midlands and moved in with her mother, who makes it bitterly clear on her arrival that she intends to tolerate—rather than celebrate—her presence. Saoirse is prone to picking at psychological scabs, eerily capable of ‘…recall[ing] every bad thing that ever happened to little me with scary clarity’, and as a result, she spends her days alone and her nights at the local, running the cold calculus of who she might have been with different parents, a different postcode, a different life. When she emerges from the depths, she’s lucky enough to have her childhood best friend by her side, but this doesn’t prevent her from looking for comfort in all the wrong places.
Both novels are interested in how systemic pressures get personal. Across the board, characters are undermined by those around them and failed by the institutions fueling Ireland’s housing crisis, but they primarily struggle against themselves. Maxwell’s cool, diaristic voice in Sugartown reveals the depths of Saoirse’s psychology before pushing the reader away with her self-summarising judgments, a carefully calculated strategy that mimics Saoirse’s downward spiral so faithfully that it’s hard not to take the bait. Saoirse’s perceptions, like her kohl-lined eyes, are ‘on fire, gas-flame blue and blazing’, capable of registering the tremors of oncoming pain from miles (or chapters) away.
Reading Thirst Trap, on the other hand, feels like being added to a long-running, reliably hilarious group chat. By rotating between Róise, Harley, and Maggie’s perspectives, O’Hare dramatises the characters’ oscillations between cohesion and independence. Her polyphonic prose is meticulous, precise, and very funny, highlighting the shared nature of the friends’ struggles without compromising their individuality. Towards the end of the book, O’Hare includes a winking, fourth-wall-grazing flourish from one of Maggie’s dates: ‘I want to read a memoir that someone wrote between seshes—no, during seshes—something that ends with uncertainty. That’s life.’
With characters constantly facing off against their own bad habits, it’s no coincidence that much of the action in both novels happens at parties: Thirst Trap opens with its protagonists smuggling a cactus into a club in central Belfast; a key passage in Sugartown describes Saoirse booting and rallying at a music festival with stoical dedication. In one scene, Maggie meets a paramour trying to uncork a wine bottle with a hairclip, and in another, Saoirse gets stoned at a house party until the sunrise blanches the stars. The protagonists’ highs are occasionally euphoric, and their lows—well, you can imagine. In Thirst Trap, O’Hare writes about the morning-after with postdromal acuity:
The kerb, painted colourfully like a rainbow-brick toy town, looks grubby in the early morning; Union Street is littered with takeaway cartons and fag ends and charred embers of rapture. The club doors are barred like a sacred cloister.
O’Hare in particular is interested in the sesh as a social, perhaps even spiritual, technology. Thirst Trap’s fun, frothy dialogue is underpinned by a nuanced understanding of how nights out function as opportunities for intimacy in a culture obsessed with individualism and flattened by financialisation. The novel captures the weird, wonderful ways that female friendships create and sustain their own micro-myths. To the world, she might be a canny young professional, but to Harley, Róise will always be the girl who stole a half-empty pint glass on St Patrick’s Day and got Guinness all over her tampons; to Róise, Lydia will always be the girl with the foresight to invest in a hair crimper for a Mary-Kate-and-Ashley themed party. In the end, the book suggests that intimacy is forged in crisis but also in remembered moments of celebration, humiliation, and recognition, a million little communions.
This ode to the value of nights out feels especially resonant at a moment when the sesh—and in-personal social connections at large—seem to be dropping in younger generations. Institutions have reinforced this cultural shift; this May, Dublin City Council revoked an outdoor license for a popular bar on one of its busiest streets, reflecting what The Irish Times described as ‘hostility to hanging out‘; a few months later, iconic nearby nightclub Izakaya Basement was forced to close after noise complaints from a new hotel. Policy analysts have pointed to a lack of social space with ‘park, cafe, and library deserts’ across Ireland as well as the decline in nightlife.
If Thirst Trap captures the ecstasy of social rituals, though, Sugartown captures the agony: in excruciating detail, Saoirse relays what it’s like to stay at the party a little too long, a little too often, sipping warm beer, crashing on couches, picking petty fights. It’s a testament to Maxwell’s talent that the stakes of each line, sip, and shot feel as dire as they do as Saoirse’s appetite for oblivion increases. During a headier high, Saoirse escapes the cruel insults that haunt her (‘Bad apple. Bad daughter. Bad person’) to experience a different flavor of insignificance. She writes:
I watched the walls breathe, deep in the chest of some great being, swelling and shrinking to fit a narrative my brain could not comprehend […] Everything I had done and ever would do amounted to a flatline this far up. In the glaring darkness of the Milky Way, my emotions were moot, my experiences a blip on an infinite calendar, a dot of ink on the trillionth Friday of the billionth April of the millionth year.
There is a strange comfort in this phantasmagoria, the limits of her agency brought into stark, even liberating, focus. In Sugartown and Thirst Trap, the sesh relieves characters from the performance of composure and the practice of ambition, hustling their attention away from the cipher of self-actualisation towards more intimate needs. The friends in Thirst Trap remind each other to slow down, drink water, and stick together as they take hits of MDMA in the club. When Sugartown’s Saoirse isolates herself in her room after a night out gone wrong, her best friend untangles, brushes, and blow-dries her hair.
These novels understand that hyperconnectedness comes with a price, though, and their characters often find themselves without a sense of direction. Saoirse knows that her future depends on fortifying her sense of self, a sentiment comically crystallised in her devotion to a boot-sale table lamp which everyone else seems to hate. Similarly, the Belfast trio struggle to articulate their needs without Lydia’s regularly scheduled advice on ‘what they ought to be doing with their lives’. The morning-after and the Millennial condition are figured as fractals: states which enforce an eternal present, a blinkered fixation on solving the problem in front of you and a crushing, though occasionally blissful, inability to do anything else.
Like many of their real-life peers, the characters in these novels want to live better, but there is a real sense that austerity has already been priced into their ambitions. Fisher argued that depression under capitalism manifests as low self-expectation, and there is a faint watermark of it here, visible in the girls’ mostly private, largely conventional desires. To prevent an outbreak of hope, Saoirse balances her decision to apply for graduate school with the defensive resolution to forget where she’s applied in the first place, while Maggie trains for a race and Róise considers taking a new job. These are admirable acts of personal fulfillment executed in difficult circumstances—but they’re also hedged bets.
Nonetheless, Sugartown and Thirst Trap give their characters the grace to evolve on their own terms. Their trajectories mirror the classic ‘heroine’s journey’ mapped by critic Maureen Murdock—a quest not for outward conquest but for a reclaimed self. For Róise, Harley, and Maggie, this reclamation comes in the form of a newfound passion for home improvement: a literal picking up of pieces. For Saoirse, it appears as the conjuring of a new character-self: ‘New Saoirse’, defined by the acts of self-harm she no longer commits and the acts of self-belief that she does. To counterweight the pull of the past, the protagonists must become strange to themselves.
Still, the few visions of the future included in these novels are mostly ambivalent about adulthood in the traditional sense, a phase of life that Róise cheekily summarises as ‘mortgages and gardens and babies.’ While their characters circle anxieties about these pressures—Maggie chafes at a sideways comment about her ‘dented’ maternal instincts, Lydia jokes about her five hypothetical husbands—the lost futures that haunt these texts are not chiefly about marriage or motherhood. In Saoirse’s vision of her ideal future, she and Doireann:
get settled into single gals’ life in the big city like we were in a best-friends movie, Thelma and Louise, Romy and Michele, Cher and Dionne. We’d drink espressos and smoke all the cigarettes and live on crackers and cheese while rushing from work to disco bars to parties and back, always living on the edge of something huge.
Finally, the strongest force in these novels, neither ‘absent or present, dead or alive’, is that of sisterhood. For better or worse, friendships are the ghosts they’re scared to give up. In this way, these books are odes to the camaraderie and complicity that define so many young women’s lives, their pages rife with the spoils of late-stage girlhood: borrowed outfits, shared cigarettes, and half-kept secrets. As they struggle for and against their own independence, the young women of Sugartown and Thirst Trap are gripped by anticipatory grief, mourning their closest friendships before their departure is complete.
With these compelling debuts, Maxwell and O’Hare seem to suggest that fiction might play a critical role in healing this fracture. Where systems fail, stories might, on some scale, succeed. These books are a welcome reminder that novels can preserve and probe the myths that sustain us through each false start, tiny victory, and unexpected setback, inspiring more stories, invoking more ghosts.