I’ll confess it was with fingers crossed that I opened Caitriona Lally’s beguiling debut novel, Eggshells, of which I had previously seen the first 10,000 words as one of three judges for the Irish Writers’ Centre Novel Fair in 2014, where it proved one of a dozen winners. However, I didn’t have to keep fingers crossed for long, as the novel proceeded to keep every promise made in its opening pages. You could call Eggshells a character-driven novel, though you don’t often meet a protagonist as driven as Vivian, a vulnerable, youngish Dublin woman in dogged search of herself, and what an idiosyncratic self she proves to be. Sufficiently idiosyncratic to have me look up its Greek/French roots...
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