The Benefactors with Wendy Erskine

Event information

Wendy Erskine joins us on Friday 12 September to discuss her book, The Benefactors, one of the most talked about novels of this year. A tender, funny and devastating polyphonic story of mother hood, aspiration, class and sex.

‘Beautifully written, it’s a sharp, timely look at the shockwaves caused by a traumatic event.’ Grazia

‘Northern Ireland’s most exciting novelist… an absorbing and clever structure that feels fresh and exciting.’ Daily Telegraph

In The Benefactors we meet Frankie, Miriam and Bronagh - very different women but all mothers to 18-year-old boys. Glamorous Frankie, now married to a wealthy, older man, grew up in care. Miriam has recently lost her beloved husband Kahlil in ambiguous circumstances. Bronagh, the CEO of a children's services charity, loves the celebrity and prestige this brings her. They do not know each other yet, but when their sons are accused of sexually assaulting Misty Johnston, whose family lacks the wealth and social-standing of their own, they'll leverage all the power of their position to protect their children.

From the prize-winning author of Dance Move and Sweet Home, this is an astounding novel about intimate histories, class and money - and what being a parent means. Brutal, tender and rigorously intelligent, The Benefactors is a daring, polyphonic presentation of modern-day Northern Ireland. It is also very funny.

Wendy is the author of two short story collections, Sweet Home and Dance Move. She was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize, longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, and she received the Butler Literary Award and the Edge Hill Readers’ Choice Award. She edited the art anthology well I just kind of like it. A Fellow of the Royal Society of
Literature, she is a frequent broadcaster and interviewer, and works as a secondary school teacher in Belfast.

‘The Benefactors presents a mosaic of contemporary types and brims with artful juxtapositions. Erskine has a remarkably agile narrative method, mastered by learning the concision required for short stories. This is an intricately wrought, frequently brilliant novel.’ Literary Review

‘This Belfast novel has the style of Woolf but the heart of Dickens. Wendy Erskine’s The Benefactors moves beyond the Troubles and shows that money has become the city’s new dividing line — it’s ripe for TV adaptation… You feel the whole novel screaming, from behind its experimental veneer, to be made into the next Big Little Lies… For all the formal subtlety and fragmentation of this impressive novel, then, it is amazing to see there is such a warmly conventional heart beating beneath the Woolfian multiple perspectives and the deliberate haziness with which Erskine depicts the novel’s central act of class-based injustice.’ The Times