Nightflowers

Journeying deep into a haunted interior, Claire-Louise Bennett’s Nightflowers is buzzing with vivid, unforgettable and colourful imagery. The pages are filled with striking sights of oranges rotting in the street and candlelit tables filled with resplendent dishes as well as more mundane flashes of daily life. An irritatingly flimsy shower screen or cardboard boxes overflowing with unwanted travel brochures are a few examples.

Bennett’s new commission is especially poignant against a backdrop of the precarious and traumatic reality of housing in contemporary Ireland. The protagonist obsesses over having a home, while also gently mocking the conventions of domestic space and how our lives and interactions are shaped by the four walls around us. Barely containing a lingering promise of violence and destruction, the nocturnal haze of Nightflowers sparkles with Bennett’s arrow-sharp prose.