Menu
The 2023 An Post Irish Book Awards shortlists boast a variety of powerful books tackling mental health, both from a personal and systemic perspective. From the calm found in the watery depths to incarceration, a volatile childhood, and more, explore five of this year’s works with unblinking mental health narratives.
Living with her parents, attempting gruelling online dating, and worn thin by work, Claire Walsh found herself in need of radical change. She spontaneously booked a flight to Central America, leading her on a path towards the sport of freediving, a path that would alter the emotional trajectory of her life, leading her to the extraordinary tools that continue to help her navigate her struggles with mental health.
Claire Walsh spent her twenties living the life she thought she was supposed to live, all the while playing hide-and-seek with depression. In her thirties, finding herself single and living with her parents, she decided it was time to chart a different path.
In Central America, Claire discovered freediving, plunging up to 60 metres below the water’s surface without the use of breathing apparatus. It taught her the power of breathwork, but more importantly, it taught her how to find freedom in the present moment. Under Water is a candid and captivating story of what it’s like to take part in one of the most dangerous sports in the world, and a reminder that sometimes all we need to do is take a deep breath.
Under Water is shortlisted for Eason Sports Book of the Year in Association with Ireland AM.
Interweaving generations of women in psychiatric hospitals, newcomer Molly Hennigan charts her personal and family history, from her evolving relationship with her grandmother to her great-grandmother’s incarceration in Grangegorman, as well as the broader labelling of non-conformist women as mentally ill. The Celestial Realm is tender, beautiful and full of wisdom.
“Phil doesn’t like physical affection. She doesn’t love you because you don’t exist. She doesn’t care if you have something important coming up. A busy week, a daunting appointment, a divorce, because she believes the world is going to end in the morning. Every morning.”
Having grown up visiting her grandmother in various psychiatric hospitals, Molly Hennigan began writing about the gaps in and intimacies of her relationship with this matriarch. Tracing the organic path of her grandmother’s experience to her great-grandmother’s time in Irish mental hospitals, she explores her own family trauma and what it means to be an unconventional woman in a society that values conformity.
The Celestial Realm is shortlisted for the Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year.
PJ Gallagher’s striking memoir relays a tumultuous childhood spent living with the schizophrenic men his parents took into their fold. PJ describes it as ‘a psychiatric experiment crossed with an alcoholic experiment. . . a place run by two people who were extraordinarily drunk and guarded by a potentially vicious dog with a brain tumour.’ Reflecting on how these early experiences shaped him, leading to later depression and anxiety, Gallagher candidly shares his journey to finding family and home in adult life.
PJ Gallagher spent much of his childhood knocking back Lucozade with the local alcoholics in his parents’ northside pub. But the chaos that reigned for his first ten years was nothing compared to what happened when – having lost the pub – his mum took in psychiatric patients from the local hospital to give them ‘care in the community’. Now it was a household of ten – PJ, his sister, his parents and six lost souls. Worst. Idea. Ever.
Madhouse is PJ’s riotous life story. Covering everything from dogs, motorbikes and the art of small talk, to the lessons of mental breakdown and finally figuring out love, this is PJ unbound.
Madhouse is shortlisted for Bookselling Ireland Biography of the Year.
Poetic and emotional, This is My Sea is a moving journey of grief and healing, of what can be lost and what can be found again. Returning to the wild coast of Kerry, Miriam Mulcahy finds that the green waters carry healing powers in their swell, keeping her afloat even as her pain threatens to pull her under.
Over the course of seven difficult years, Miriam Mulcahy lost her mother, father and sister, each grief threatening to drown her. But instead of going under she discovered the lessons of the sea, letting the water teach her how to get through anything in life: one breath builds on another, another stroke, another kick and you will get home.
This Is My Sea takes our greatest fear, death, and wraps it up in language so fine and beautiful that the reader is carried along and comforted by how completely lost Miriam was and how she found solace in all the things that sustained her: books, music, art, friends, love, swimming, and of course the sea.
This is My Sea is shortlisted for Bookstation Lifestyle Book of the Year.
Negotiating depression, trauma and suicide, Noel O’Regan’s debut, Though the Bodies Fall, is set at the end of Kerry Head, where the plummeting cliffs summon forth lost souls. Micheál is left with the duty of saving these suffering folk, to the detriment of his own mind and relationships, as he struggles to free himself from this black spot on the land.
Micheál Burns lives alone in his family’s bungalow at the end of Kerry Head in Ireland. It is a picturesque place, but the cliffs have a darker side to them: for generations they have been a suicide black spot. Micheál’s mother saw the saving of these lost souls – these visitors – as her spiritual duty, and now, in the wreckage of his life, Micheál finds himself continuing her work. When his sisters tell him that they want to sell the land, he must choose between his siblings and the visitors, a future or a past.
Though the Bodies Fall is shortlisted for the Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year.