Community and craft at heart of new novel

Elaine Feeney’s latest novel How to Build a Boat is the story of one boy’s dream and how it changes the lives of those around him. Like her previous, award-winning book, it’s set in the West of Ireland. She likes to write about what she knows, as she tells JUDY MURPHY.

She’s also obsessed by institutions, by who holds power and by what they do with that power.

I am weirdly connected to the place I live,” says author Elaine Feeney, whose latest novel, How to Build a Boat, will be launched at Kennys’ Bookshop on Friday, April 21, during the Cúirt International Festival of Literature.        It’s the second novel from the Athenry writer whose 2020 debut, As You Were, won the Kate O’Brien Award and was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize.

Like Elaine’s debut, this book is firmly located in the West of Ireland, the place she has “committed to witnessing” and writing about.

“I feel it’s so bountiful and brilliant and brutal and I do like to write about what I know.”

How to Build a Boat centres on Jamie, a highly intelligent 13-year-old who faces daily challenges dealing with the world, because he sees life differently to most people.

Jamie, whose mother, Noelle, died after giving birth to him, is being reared by his father, Eoin, and is about to enter secondary school as the novel opens.

This is a highly religious, all-boys’ institution where the powers-that-be are more concerned about the social standing of students’ parents than anything else. Not good news for this motherless mathematical genius who also has to deal with being autistic. But Jamie encounters two other lost souls, teachers Tess and Tadhg, and their unlikely alliance brings light to all of their lives, albeit in a messy, human way.

Elaine, a secondary teacher, is currently on a career break from St Jarlath’s College in Tuam but her years in the education system and her experiences of dealing with pupils in a single-gender school have given her a profound insight into the world of teenage boys.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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