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Habitat, the debut novel from Catriona Shine | A Sunday Times, Irish Times and The Journal Most Anticipated Book of 2024
Habitat follows seven neighbours over the course of a surreal and life-changing week as their mid-century apartment building in Oslo begins to inexplicably break down around them. Connected by familial ties, long acquaintance, simmering feuds and longing glimpses, the residents of the building are bound to one another in more ways than they know.
As each inhabitant is touched by strange and sinister phenomena, and their apartment-sized worlds begin to fray at the seams, they struggle to grasp that this is a shared crisis that cannot be borne alone.
This remarkable debut novel from one of Ireland’s most promising emerging talents is a startling parable of our uncertain age – a beautiful and inciteful examination of how we deal with seismic events beyond our comprehension and how we can only truly find meaning through shared understanding. Habitat is comparable to Kafka’s Metamorphosis or Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros in how people respond to an uncanny situation.
The building components give their own take on being used for the purposes of these people, their voices containing the longer perspective of materials that existed before the building, and which will survive in some form beyond its destruction …
There are deep troughs in coastal woods where our skeletal grains once lay … We were poured into moulds, and we set, gripping rods of steel … We cling, but it is you who fear, who must be kept apart from members of your species who are not your family. We rest our edges on walls of bricks, transferring our load, the load of you and your possessions. You have no plan for us after this. Your thoughts will crumble with us.
PRAISE FOR HABITAT BY CATRIONA SHINE
‘In this unsettling contemporary fable, which is a brilliant analogy for our collective apathy in the face of environmental destruction, Shine depicts a disparate group of characters, each of whom is isolated in their struggle to manage impending chaos in an apartment block in Oslo. Lucid and uncanny, the story lingers long in the mind.’ Cathy Sweeney
‘Truly uncanny – a novel that marries the cosmic nightmare of Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! with the sociological portraits of Ken Loach. Chapter by chapter, in the face of forces that are undeniable and elemental, Habitat’s domesticated world of rules and regulations deforms itself into something unsettling and eerily recognisable. I’ve never read anything quite like it.’ Colin Walsh
‘Shine’s gaze is fresh, observant and unsettling. Habitat is an inventive and compelling read, a remarkable debut from an immensely talented writer.’ Danielle McLaughlin
‘Habitat is an uncanny fable of, and for, a disintegrating world – a bold and strikingly original debut from a sophisticated new voice in Irish fiction.’ Lucy Caldwell
‘Shine is definitely one to watch in 2024.’ Aoife Barry
One to watch in 2024: ‘Her plot immediately makes her stand out from the crowd.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Catriona Shine grew up in Ireland and now works as an architect in Oslo. She is a recipient of an Arts Council Literature Bursary Award 2023 and her writing has appeared in The Dublin Review, Channel, Southword and elsewhere. She was awarded the Penfro First Chapter Prize in 2016 and IAFOR Vladimir Devidé Haiku Award in 2017. She was shortlisted for the Seán O’Faoláin Short Story Prize 2022 and the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award 2023 among others. Habitat was longlisted for the McKitterick Prize 2022.
BN1144
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All fall down
3 1/2 stars actually. Worth reading but to me a bit disappointing: the account of a weirdly decaying building could have been soaked in atmosphere but attention given to the people living in it lessened impact of that decay, Readers who care about rounded characters would probably enjoy it more than I did, Clever & well-writtem. just not what I'd hoped for.
