Things are not good for Ellie. Her husband has left her for his young and pregnant mistress. Besides sustaining her son, Ellie is unofficial caretaker of her mother and elderly aunts, who fret away in their near-derelict ancestral home. Thankfully, she has her job at the Blessed Oliver Plunkett libary, an antiquated branch stifled by cuts and frequented mainly by cranky geriatrics. But things go askew when Proinsias O hUiginn, library boss and radical Catholic activist, is found hanging in his office, dead. The council has been waiting for just such an opportunity to close the library.
Ellie, the Blessed Oliver and its socially excluded users cling to the margins of an urban life in which they have little place. From the opening scene, where staff find a familiar vagrant assaulted outside their building, Jackie Mills's novel Ellie plots a concern for those who have been discarded. Rather than a familiar story of festering neglect, Ellie portrays a community of characters, each of whom is galvanised by the question of what it means to lose a person, either oneself or another. Neatly paced with twists of mystery and overdue longing, Mills's book makes deft use of the extent to which finding and reclaiming that which was lost is central to thriller and romance genres. Through Ellie's perspective and her flashes of wry humour, the story washes over the reader and new motifs of here and now emerge. Mills's debut is entertaining, readable and conjures a slow expectancy that is perfectly timed for autumn evenings.
Kathy Cremin is a lecturer in English at the University of York