If I’m writing a first draft, I write from six to eight in the morning,” she says. “I work to word counts […] it’s a lot about just getting it down and getting it in place. And then I do so much editing.” Aoileann lives on the most rural part of a small, hostile island, cut off from the local community. Her paternal grandmother rules the roost; her shattered, guilt-ridden father comes and goes; and her mother - or what's left of her - lies bed-bound, silent, staring, gaping. They are survivors of a devastating catastrophe; an incident that has made them outcasts, despite being islanders themselves. Her seventh book and fifth novel, My Hot Friend (Hachette, 2023) was shortlisted for an Irish Book Award.

The sea is death reanimated. Down under the shimmying surface, the currents conduct the corpses and they sway in a dance, ringed around the island’s underbelly.The house in which Aoileann is at the furthest, least accessible, part of the island and its windows have been boarded up with stones. Aoileann lives with her paternal grandmother, an islander, who she calls Móraí, and her mother, originally from the mainland. But no-one on the island knows that her mother is there, believing her to have died around the time Aoileann was born, and she is bed-bound and dumb, seemingly in some form of permanent post-natal depression, and is treated by Aoileann and Móraí as little more than an animal, or perhaps, even worse an object. Aoileann’s daily life is punctuated by routine and thankless tasks, interspersed with taunting and humiliating her mother for the life she cannot have and the mother she cannot bond with. It is while scrubbing the floor of the cottage that she starts to see markings scratched on the floors where she realises that her mother has attempted to escape during the night, and when Aoileann writes them all down, she realises her mother has secrets and a past that that will slowly come to light which will impact her world in ways she cannot imagine.

Where I End has surpassed Human Remains by Elizabeth Haynes for the title of the creepiest novel I have read, and I didn’t think anything could get more disturbing than Human Remains. The island seems to be some kind of breac-ghaeltacht, but what’s spoken there is a dialect barely related to Irish. I think when you have a baby, you suddenly are hit by your own terrible power, and how your work from then on is to not harm your children, whether overtly or passively. And I think that’s something that constantly interests me in my work.” A small and well-defined central cast of characters held sway over this story, with their dour and brooding persona and aura of impending doom. They were all pretty uncompelling, disturbing, loathsome individuals, and not one of them did I have any real empathy with, or sympathy for. Yes! They were definitely given a strong voice with which to tell their story, however it got to the stage where I simply couldn’t trust a single word which came out of any of their mouths! At best they were complex, volatile and unreliable, at their worst they were manipulative, duplicitous and malevolent. Every time I had the slightest urge to feel even slightly sorry for any one of them, within seconds they had said or done something else to have me seething and truly angry with them, all over again. A cast of ‘extras’ were alluded to, but thankfully didn’t appear in any important capacity, as I don’t think I could have stood the strain. The term ‘corpsing’, White explains, is used in the theatre world to describe an actor breaking character on stage, usually in the form of laughter. If we take this to be White’s corpsing moment, letting the mask slip and daring to tell it like it is, then we can only hope for more like this from her.

It is when she is on the beach that she meets Rachel, an artist and single mother of a young baby that Aoileann finds herself immediately drawn to. Watching Rachel with her baby causes Aoileann to see the maternal connection that she has never had, the love that so many take for granted she has never experienced. She becomes fixated with Rachel and longs to be as important to her as her baby seems to be. A few of the missing appear to correspond to ‘graves’ and testimony from islanders claiming to be surviving family, would it seem, corroborate this. However, there are at least seven others entirely unaccounted for. Where I End by Sophie White is likely to be one of the last books I read in 2022, and is certainly the most viscerally powerful and disturbing. In a horrifying twist, it’s revealed that the mother has been scratching signs into the floorboards. Good Jaysus! What the hell did I just read?! This review will be mainly about the unsettling vibes of Sophie White’s Where I End because discussing the plot would give too much away. But, also, if I explained the whole story, you wouldn’t believe me anyway.