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The Benefactors: Longlisted for the 2026 Women's Prize for Fiction
Wendy Erskine
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AN OBSERVER BEST DEBUT NOVEL 2025
SHORTLISTED FOR NOVEL OF THE YEAR AT THE AN POST IRISH BOOK AWARDS
LONGLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE
'What a joy it is to read'
Michael Magee, author of Close to Home
'I couldn't put this book down'
Sheena Patel, author of I'm A Fan
'Powerful, moving, compelling, utterly enthralling'
Jon McGregor, author of Reservoir 13
'A prodigiously talented author: funny and brutal by turns'
Guardian
'The style of Woolf but the heart of Dickens'
Sunday Times
'Vital reading'
Spectator
'I miss it already . . . What a beautiful, hilarious blast of brilliance'
Donal Ryan, author of Heart, Be at Peace
'A cast of characters so vividly drawn it feels like you've known them all your life'
Colin Walsh, author of Kala
Meet Frankie, Miriam and Bronagh: three very different women from Belfast, but all mothers to eighteen-year-old boys.
Gorgeous Frankie, now married to a wealthy, older man, grew up in care. Miriam has recently lost her beloved husband Kahlil in ambiguous circumstances. Bronagh, the CEO of a children's services charity, loves celebrity and prestige. When their sons are accused of sexually assaulting a friend, Misty Johnston, they'll come together to protect their children, leveraging all the powers they possess. But on her side, Misty has the formidable matriarch, Nan D, and her father, taxi-driver Boogie: an alliance not so easily dismissed.
Brutal, tender and rigorously intelligent, The Benefactors is a daring, multi-voice presentation of modern-day Northern Ireland. It is also very funny.
Read MorePraise for The Benefactors: Longlisted for the 2026 Women's Prize for Fiction
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This Belfast novel has the style of Woolf but the heart of Dickens . . . Erskine - a gifted short story writer who has been longlisted for the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award - deploys a style closer to Virginia Woolf than to HBO, delivering scattershot glimpses of events through the eyes of a broad cast of characters . . . for all the formal subtlety and fragmentation of this impressive novel, then, it is amazing to see there is such a warmly conventional heart beating beneath the Woolfian multiple perspectives and the deliberate haziness with which Erskine depicts the novel's central act of class-based injustice - Sunday TimesWendy Erskine's first novel arrives after two collections that stake her claim to be the most talented Irish short story writer to emerge from either side of the border in the past decade . . . the voice is intimate and flexible, inviting us to ridicule a character's failings one minute and understand them the next, offering and then resisting caricature. Through the interplay with the first-person vignettes we gain a panorama of character that includes what these people no longer know about themselves . . . The reader will come away from the book with a sense of a writer of an unrivalled range of imaginative empathy, and of a city teeming with joy and sadness. - Financial TimesSo fresh, so sharp, so wry, so alive; so much contemporary fiction feels flat and fake in comparison. In all of its glorious polyphony, The Benefactors brims with humanity. It's got snap, it's got sparkle, it's got soul . . . I adored it.The Benefactors is a novel as perfectly pitched, surefooted, and charged with feeling as her gleaming, precise storiesA powerful, moving, compelling, utterly enthralling debut novel from the excellent Wendy Erskine . . . We're all better off for being able to read a novel as rich as thisOne of the best books of the year - Belfast TelegraphA truly remarkable novel - The Benefactors is both intimate and panoramic, full of clear-eyed compassion and wry wit, and with a cast of characters so vividly drawn it feels like you've known them all your life. This is powerful, masterful storytelling by one of the most exciting writers at work todayWendy Erskine flourishes her captivating style in The Benefactors, with a depth of insight which at times feels like epiphany . . . An essential novel, and Wendy Erskine an essential novelist. It is an inspired testament to survival - I was incredibly moved by it.
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