One woman’s routines unravel when a lodger arrives.
Joan, a Cork-based public servant, relies on carefully managed rituals to get through each day-until an unexpected break from work leads her to take in a young lodger. As their shared life takes shape, her ordered world begins to shift in unsettling, surprising ways.
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Rituals
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One woman’s routines unravel when a lodger arrives.
Joan, a Cork-based public servant, relies on carefully managed rituals to get through each day-until an unexpected break from work leads her to take in a young lodger. As their shared life takes shape, her ordered world begins to shift in unsettling, surprising ways.
- Book Synopsis
-
Joan, a public servant in her fifties, is in the habit of living alone. Or rather, she’s in the habit of living with the many rituals and routines—some ordinary, some less so—that allow her to navigate her days.
It’s a system that works very well for Joan… until it doesn’t. An unexpected career break prompts her to take in a lodger, a young man studying English Literature at the university. Together they must learn to negotiate everything from a shared bathroom to the hazards of global warming.
Set in Cork city, Rituals takes us inside an obsessive mind and invites us to reflect upon the power and beauty contained within our daily lives, but also the dark grip of compulsion. By turns tender, funny and poignant, it celebrates the bravery involved in opening our hearts to change and to chance.
Ideal for readers who…
- love character-driven literary fiction about routine, solitude, and lives quietly transformed
- enjoy novels that balance tenderness, humour, and poignancy with psychological depth
- are drawn to stories about unlikely housemates and the small negotiations of shared living
- want a Cork-set novel that reflects on compulsion, daily rituals, and the beauty of ordinary life
- like thoughtful, emotionally intelligent fiction about opening yourself to change and chance
- Product Details
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- ISBN
- 9781916914049
- Format
- Paperback
- Publisher
- Stinging Fly Press, (23 April 2026)
- Number of Pages
- 162
- Language
- English
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