This book was amazing. It dealt with so many emotions, life issues and topical concerns. I have read quite a few books set in Ireland, but I loved this one the most. Like or loath the main character, you’ve got to respect her for what she going through/ gone through. The way the author describes the characters is superb, it’s like you actually know them.

A superb debut novel.

I could not get into the book, and did not finish it. No doubt that is subjective, and other people might find it fascinating, but it was not for me, unfortunately.

I really struggled to finish this book. The protagonist was unlikable and the other characters didn't engage me enough to keep track of who was who. The prose felt affected and I found myself skimming a lot of it. Not to my taste.

As You Were by Elaine Feeney

Sinead is admitted to hospital in Galway, Ireland with complications arising from having terminal cancer. There follows the story of her and her fellow patients, by turns humorous, poignant, angry and everything in between.

What an amazing debut by Elaine Feeney! I absolutely loved this book and read it in a day. The array of themes covered is astonishing, for example religion, mother and baby homes, domestic violence, shame, parish politics, infidelity, forbidden love, patriarchy... but there are many more. The author introduces these themes in an extemely skillful way, woven seamlessly into the fabric of Sinead and her fellow patients' stories. The result is an extremely compelling book - I loved Margaret Rose, thought that Jane was an exceptionally well-drawn character and even the minor characters, Molly, Michal, the nurses, were so real. What a talent Elaine Feeney has - I can't wait to see what she does next. Highly recommended!

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC of this book.

The further you read into this book the more involving and entertaining it becomes. The author brilliantly weaves the stories of a disparate group of patients in a ward from hell!

A claustrophic, well written tale.
This story is set mainly in a hospital ward. We follow the lives of the patients and slowly, slowly we find out about their lives as each tale unravels.

The main character, Sinead, is flawed and multilayered, as we all are. We find out why she is in hospital and we find out more about her, from her interactions with her follow patients and with her husband Alex. The hospital scenes are realistic and true to life. It gave me, the reader, a sense of being on the hospital ward, observing the interactions between Sinead, Jane, Margaret Rose, Hegs and Shane.

Elaine Feemy was pitch perfect in describing how some patients have to conduct their lives from their hospital beds; you can't help but overhear the snippets of what makes up a life. She caught the indelicacies of sharing a space with strangers perfectly.

A brave, sometimes uncomfortable book to read. Elaine Feeny has exceptional talent and this book will leave the reader with plenty of food for thought.

Sinéad Hynes is in hospital, her family believes it is nothing serious, maybe the property developer just worked too much. But she knows better and has kept it a secret for quite some time: the cancer is terminal and now it is too late for a treatment. Suffering severely, she shares the ward with Margaret Rose who welcomes all her family daily and thus creates an almost intolerable fuss. There is also Jane who is often confused, but at times, she remembers, e.g. that she had known the mother of another patient who shares the ward. Strangers become intimate, enclosed in such a tight environment and thus, they necessarily take part of the others’ fate and get to know their secrets.

Elaine Feeney’s debut is like a theatre play: a limited place with a limited number of characters who cannot escape the narrowness of the situation they are in and who are forced into an involuntary community where they have to support each other and also, reluctantly, share intimate details of their lives. At times funny, at others very melancholy, and always showing characters exposed to this small world without any protection where also no sensitive politeness is required anymore.

What troubled me most was to which extent I could identify with Sinéad and her situation. Luckily, I have never been close to such extreme circumstances but I can completely understand why she keeps her secret from her family and prefers to consult Google and tell it to a magpie instead of seeking help and compassion from her beloved ones. As readers, we follow her thoughts and only get her point of view of the events in the ward which is limited and biased, of course, but also reveals the discrepancy between what we see and understand what really goes on behind the facade of a person.

The plot also touches a very serious topic in two very different ways: double standards and honesty. Sinéad is not really frank with her husband, they do have some topics they need to talk about and which they obviously have avoided for years. Yet, for her, it is difficult to believe that somebody could just love her unconditionally and whom she can tell anything. On the other hand, the Irish catholic church’s handling with pregnant unmarried women becomes a topic – and institution which calls itself caring and welcoming everybody unconditionally played a major role in the destruction of lives.

Surely, “As You Were” is not the light-hearted summer beach read, but a through-provoking insight in a character’s thinking and struggles which touched me deeply.

You can’t love them all and for me this was one of them. It promised so much, set in Ireland where I’m from, a unique unusual read (which in fairness it was) and something a bit different. I struggled with this from the begInning but stuck with it, however unlike me but I’m throwing in the towel.
I’ve got to 47% but it’s not for me.. No doubt it will go on to win accolades but it just didn’t float my boat

I count myself very fortunate to have reached almost 60 years of age with only very limited experience of hospitals. I have never stayed a night in hospital myself and I haven’t often had friends or relatives lying in hospital needing visitors. Which is a long-winded way of saying that the setting for this book is relatively strange to me: a shared, mixed sex ward in a hospital in Ireland where a small group of people are thrown together by their illnesses.

I have to say that I went on quite a journey with this book. The first half I found quite a struggle to read and I almost abandoned it at several points. At about the halfway mark there’s a dramatic episode which changes everything, both the focus of the story and the way that story is being told to us as readers. I found the second half of the book far more interesting and absorbing.

The story we read is bouncing several key themes around. Primarily, we follow Sinéad after her admittance to the hospital. She has only told a magpie and Google what is wrong with her, leaving her husband and children in the dark. This deliberate choice to hide something about her body plays out in parallel with other events in the book that take us into the area of Irish abortion laws, which forced many girls to hide things about their own bodies, and the euphemistic “trips to England” that young girls would take. And this in turn links to discussion of Irish political and social history including the mistreatment of women who were treated more as property than as human beings. What is uncovered during the interactions of the ward patients are stories of domestic violence, of hidden pregnancies, of forced marriages, of hidden sexuality.

All of this means that the further you get into the book, the more absorbing and affecting it becomes. Personally, I found the dialogue in the book didn’t work for me, especially in the first half, and this meant that I found myself getting picky about individual words (in the main narrative, not just the speech) that I didn’t like. That’s never a good sign when I am reading. But, after the dramatic midpoint, I found myself far more engaged and I settled in and read the second half of the book in almost a single session. This, of course IS a good sign when I am reading.

My thanks to Random House UK for an ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

A beautiful yet heartbreaking novel that I am sure will resonate with many readers. Highly recommended.

To be honest, it took me a long time to ‘get into’ the story however it is a well written book, which deals with a variety of highly emotional and personal themes.

This book took me a long time to read to get into the story of Sinead,
The Story of Sinead is set in a hospital ward ,Sinead has a terminal illness.

Very mix bag of emotions reading this book

Elaine Feeney is an Irish poet and this is her debut novel – one which I believe follows on the key themes and ideas which inspire her poetry, but also one informed by her personal experiences (after the difficult birth of her second child).

On one level this is a moving and at times almost unbearably emotional story of a mother (Sinead) who keeps her terminal cancer from her husband and three boys (confiding as we learn in the opening chapter only in a solitary unlucky magpie and in Google).

At a second level it brilliantly conveys, in a way I have not seen covered before in literary fiction, the life of a hospital ward with a group of seriously ill long term patients (including a matriarch of an extended working class – possibly traveller - family who claims to have suffered a stroke, a West Country councilman with lung cancer and his pushy daughter, a young paralysed man and an ex-school teacher suffering with dementia), their visitors, the nurses (one from Australia), orderlies (particularly a Polish one) and doctors. But more crucially I think it captures the tensions between shared camaraderie on one hand, and the lack of privacy and intimate level of disclosure of individual suffering on the other.

And on a third level it is a searing indictment of Ireland, an indictment written in a point of time, after the collapse of the (illusionary) Celtic Tiger, but before some recent liberalisation – but one which looks right back to the failed promises of independence and particularly a patriarchal and repressed society in which women’s bodies were considered almost property: abortion rights (and trips to England), domestic violence, forced marriages, unacknowledged miscarriages, the shame of illegitimate birth, the role of the Catholic church and its verging on superstitious practices, alcoholism, male philandering, the stigma of mental illness, corrupt Western Ireland politics and patronage and its entrenchment of privilege – I am tempted to say a laundry list of woes and the most affecting scenes feature a Magdalene laundry.

The layers interact cleverly I think – the narrator’s unwillingness to reveal her illness to her family and initially even to her fellow patients and her refusal to agree to any form of treatment is all I think motivated partly by the voice of her abusive father and his view that (compared to her brother) she was a worthless, head-in-the-cloud malinger and partly by her desire to retain the agency over her own body for as long as possible.

It is a book which seamlessly interweaves humour, emotion and invective – again I think capturing much of the spirit of a hospital ward and of the society about which it is written.

And all of this is told in an non-standard fashion. Unlike many other outstanding “voice” books (for example “Solar Bones” which I pick because Mike McCormack features in both Epigraph – taken from “Notes from a Coma” – and the acknowledgments: or “A Girl is a Half Formed Thing”, or “Ducks. Newburyport) there is not a single mono-style

Instead the book (a little I think from my limited sampling like her poetry) fuses a range of different innovative styles and methods: written summaries of text exchanges (with descriptions of emojis, deletions and “…” anticipation of replies); one-sided overheard phone calls; passages of streams of consciousness; occassional word association flights; frequently (and crucially to the story) remembered invective from the narrator’s father; lists of Google searches, copious amounts of dialect rendered dialogue, repeated imagery (the stone at the heart of James’s Giant Peach, the Magpie and an old ewe being particularly recurrent), sometimes striking prose poetry.

I think this has advantages and disadvantages – it certainly adds variety but it also makes a book which can already be hard to parse, confusing to follow. One of the fellow ward members suffers dementia which adds to the occasional impenetrability and did I think weaken one of the most difficult scenes in the book (as for some time I assumed that the devastating history she recounts of the suicide of the person closest to her was a fantasy).

Overall an excellent and distinct debut.

As You Were by Elaine Feeney is a raw, tragic, heart-breaking story set in a hospital ward in Galway, Ireland. The main character Sinead Hynes has declined treatment for her terminal illness but finds herself in a hospital bed hearing more than she would care to about the other patients with whom she shares the ward as they have no real privacy. Whilst looking out for each other as best they can, Sinead wishes more than anything to return home.

The author effortlessly and light-heartedly evokes feelings of sympathy from the reader for each of the characters but at the same time exposes the heart-breaking situations so many women found themselves dealing with, alongside the contradictions of the nation’s religious devotees and the failure of the state to provide an operational health service for patients desperately in need.

As You Were
A solid debut novel from Irish poet Elaine Feeney, I perhaps have a lot more thoughts about this book than its story warranted.
In terms of writing style, it is abrasive and vignette-y and descends into verse. Like the words of a more inhibited Eimear McBride. Which I enjoyed immensely and is to be expected from a poet. But this grated a bit when it came to dialogue, some things nearly said 3 times, especially in the text message sequences. I suppose this is true to life but would have been less slowing if actual emojis had been placed on the page.
The central plot revolving around Sinead's stoic refusal to get treatment for her illness, I liked. A decision that could leave so much room for existential tangents on the meaning of life. And death. But Feeney chooses to avoid that realm of nonsense altogether and focus more on the characters of the hospital ward. For better or for worse, this makes the book feel like it could be two really intricate seperate novels or just this one absolutely bursting to a fault story we're left with. The story of Sinead's childhood goes well with her illness but not with the happenings of matriarch Margaret Rose and her trusty Nokia.
Linked to this is the refusal of Sinead to ruminate on any sort of moral equivalency towards her situation. She repeatedly rejects the notion of prayers or religion. Magpie being her divine confidant instead. But this is then confusingly mitigated by her own feelings of not being a good wife (whatever that may mean) to Alex. Within context, this throws the whole dogma of the Catholic church in Ireland back into Sinead's face and undermines the subliminal impression of her atheism. As readers we're suddenly supposed to be pro-mass card again.
This novel also partakes in the long tradition of 'representing' members of the Irish travelling community on its pages. With an honest conversation around who historically gets to write literature and who unjustly does not going on in the world at the moment, I look forward to a blossoming of Cant novels on the horizon. Because it is no longer the place of non-travelling people to represent these experiences, however well intentioned it may be.
Despite some technical issues, this is a really great story, with loads of wonderful characters and a refreshing perspective on illness. And I think any structural faults (started 3 chapters too early, finished one chapter too late) will be ironed out by the time Feeney writes another book in the future.
Magpie is typing… (Rating:6/10)

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

This book is challenging to read as it potentially poses more questions than it answers and requires you to read between the lines in order to piece the narrative together. Despite this (and perhaps partly because of it) I really liked it. The hospital ward as melting pot allowed Feeney to explore the experiences of many Irish women across the twentieth century and highlight key events and injustices that were commonplace. It's also very easy to imagine yourself struck by the same indecision as Sinead when faced with the dilemma of disclosing illness to your loved ones. Feeney touches on many key issues - feminism, abortion, homophobia, adultery - and discusses all of them with a deftness, humour and sensitivity that is laudable. A must-read debut.

I really enjoyed this book..I found it really good for a debut writer & that I could relate in so many ways to Sinead. I look forward to more from this writer.

After many many attempts at finishing this book I gave up at 60%. Unfortunately I felt myself being forced to read it rather than enjoying it. It felt incredibly drawn out and unnecessary disjointed.

So, full disclosure, when I requested this one, I genuinely had no idea that it wouldn’t an uplifting book. Guess, who’s an idiot? Me. I am an idiot. Because of this very reason, I might be a bit biased when it comes to rating the book, however I have tried my best to review it fairly.

This is the story of Sinéad, a young woman who’s working in a hospital. A young woman who has a deep secret that she’s only told to Google and a magpie, you know, a normal human being. Yep. There are emotionally difficult topics being dealt with here and they were done well, I guess I just wasn’t ready for them. She’s working in a ward with many patients and we also learn their stories and she’s musing on them along with her own dilemma.

The problem with this book is that it tries to handle too many things at once, there are various themes through her patients that are shown to us and I wish this book was longer so those topics could have a room to flourish. The end result of this is too many topics and themes being introduced and none of them given enough time on the page.

However that’s not to say that this is a terrible book! It’s not, it has a good solid plot that I wish was explored more carefully. The writing is good and the main character, Sinéad, is not thoroughly likable which is a good thing. I like that in a book. I do wish that it was a thoroughly modern book instead of a book set in the past but presented in a ‘modern’ writing style.

Overall, it was not a bad book and for a debut, this is really good. I will definitely be watching out for more from this author because the potential is there and with tighter editing and more streamlined pace, the author could be really great! The writing is not the problem, per se, it’s the plot and pacing.

You might well find the fast and furious pace of the narration a bit hard to follow at first - I did -, but after a few pages... oh the joys! I suppose you could call As You Were a tearjerker, but of the kind that brings as many tears of laughter as of sorrow to your eyes. It's an emotional roller coaster, with larger-than-life characters, bringing all the madness and the joys and the sadness and the strangeness of an Irish hospital ward to the reader. Read it, share it, but whatever you do, don't ignore it!