It’s always a relief when a well-known person in the media writes a book, and it’s good. Former Radio 1 DJ Annie Mac, who left the station earlier this year, has done just that – her debut is assured, straddling that line between commercial and literary fiction. Macmanus is Dublin born, but studied at Queen’s, Belfast and it’s in the NI capital that she sets her novel.

Told in a dual time-line, we begin in the ‘present’ where seventeen-year-old TJ McConnell wakes up one morning to find his mother gone. Mary is nowhere to be found and she’s not answering her phone. They'd argued the night before over his plans to go to New York to find his father, and this worries him.

We go back to 1990, when Mary was nine. She lived with her older brother Sean, who she is very close to, and their father who drowns his sorrows in drink. Mary has to be mother at home for their mammy had died when she was little. Jumping four years, we meet Mary and her best friend Louise, these days Sean is always off with his mates rather than going to and from school with his sister. A few chapters and a couple of years on, we discover how TJ arrived as the result of her first sexual experience, which wasn’t exactly consensual, after a school event.

Mary, a promising student, having elected to keep her baby, is forced into a very different life to the one she imagined. She looks after her father, worries about Sean, who is descending into violence and drug addiction, and brings up TJ while working in a garden centre part-time and later joining the grounds team at Bedwood cemetery, where her mother is buried.

Macmanus combines TJ’s coming of age story, in which he finally finds out about his father, with Mary’s ongoing grief and mental torment as she loses more of those around her and her fear of losing TJ too. As is common in dual time-line novels, the past is written in the past tense, and the present in the present, and that works well. Although the plot covers nothing new, she executes it well with the right amount of drama, two main characters whom the reader immediately has sympathy for and a satisfying ending. An assured and very readable debut. Read more on my blog https://annabookbel.net/an-assured-debut-from-annie-mac

This book utterly hooked me. A stunning coming of age novel about family, motherhood and grief, set in Northern Ireland. Macmanus’ use of dual narrative (grounded in the past and the present) was superb, leading to a gripping story about Mary McConnell who after years of not knowing about her own mother, goes missing herself, leaving her son TJ to search for her.