Cover image and blurb from Goodreads:
How do you survive the unsurvivable?
Rachel lives with her husband Tom and their two children: it’s the comfortable family life she always thought she’d have. All of that changes in an instant – when one action by Tom destroys the life they’ve built, leaving Rachel to pore over the wreckage to try and understand what happened, to try and find a way to go on living afterwards.
What emerges is a snapshot of what it’s like to live alongside someone who is suffering, how you keep yourself afloat when the person you love is drowning – and how you survive irreparable loss.
Show Me Where It Hurts is utterly compelling, heartbreaking, and difficult to turn away from.
What a book to read on the first day of a new year; this is a story about living after the unimaginable. This is Claire Gleeson’s debut novel and hopefully it is the first of many (and I am not just saying that because I went to medical school with her!).. There are Irish authors I’ve read because I’ve felt I had to; here is an Irish author I’ve read because I fully wanted to and it was worth every throat catch and misty-eyed moment. The prose is concise with unexpected poetry laced through the page and there is something so very sympathetic about all the characters. It’s clever, really, how it explore the way a horrifying act does not make someone into a villain.
Perhaps that is another reason why this is a great book to read in 2025; at a time when people are becoming more rigid about right and wrong, this book doesn’t shy away from the grey areas of forgiveness and survival. The story is so compelling and, because it is told in both the past and the present, I luxuriated in not being able to predict how it was going to end (deeply satisfyingly, as it turned out) while also knowing the inevitability of past actions and seeing the red flags that are only ever obvious in retrospect.
So, my first review of the year (also hopefully the first of many) is a five star review, and no two ways about it.
TL;DR: A cleverly written book, with parallel timelines, about an unimaginable tragedy, due to an unfathomable decision, and what comes after.
Fully five stars out of five.
Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.
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