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Debuts of 2025, Volume 2: Wendy Erskine
Alice O'KeeffeIn a nutshell, I read books for a living. I interview authors for The Bookseller's weekly Author Profile slot and write the monthly New
...moreWendy Erskine’s The Benefactors is a Belfast-set, polyphonic novel following three very different women, whose sons have all been accused of sexual assault.
“People are more unusual and strange – and maybe unfathomable – than is sometimes presented in literature,” reckons Wendy Erskine, whose electrifying debut novel, The Benefactors, we are discussing over video call. She is in Belfast, having rushed home from her day job as head of English at a secondary school where she has taught for nearly 30 years. “If you can always allow for that prospect, that things could go in all sorts of directions, it keeps the characters from seeming as though they’re going down well-worn routes.”
The Benefactors, which is both funny and brutal, is a polyphonic novel about wealth and class set in contemporary Belfast that does indeed go in some unexpected directions. Fizzing with energy and with a fierce unsentimentality, it follows three very different women, Frankie, Bronagh and Miriam, who are brought together when their 18-year-old sons are accused of sexual assault.
Frankie is the beautiful second wife of a wealthy man who conceals much beneath her glossy surface, including a tough childhood spent in care and her thoughts on what her stepson has allegedly done.
In contrast, Bronagh is the CEO of a children’s charity, a woman convinced of her own importance: “Bronagh knows at heart that no one really rates her,” says Erskine. “Her husband, the people that she works with, her son. You know, no one really thinks she is all that wonderful. And she tries to preserve this illusion of being this incredibly capable individual.” The third, Miriam, has recently lost her husband in a car crash in mysterious circumstances – another woman was found beside him in the car.
These three are prepared to bring their social standing and financial clout to bear against the victim, Misty Johnston, who was sexually assaulted after her hotel shift by boys she considered to be her friends. Misty may be without their power or connections, but in her corner is her devoted, taxi-driver dad Boogie and forceful matriarch Nan D.
Erskine is well known to book-sellers as the author of two highly-acclaimed short story collections, Sweet Home and Dance Move, originally published in Ireland by Stinging Fly Press and in the UK by Picador. It was Declan Meade of Stinging Fly who first spotted Erskine’s potential as a writer when, finding her teaching timetable gave her a free afternoon on Mondays, she signed up for a six-month fiction course in Dublin. For her first novel, though, Erskine “wanted to write something that in no way could possibly ever be an elongated short story”, she tells me. “I wanted something that would contain many lives and many perspectives and that would offer a different type of reading experience.”
A striking feature of The Benefactors is the other voices that appear, speaking directly to the reader, sometimes offering observations, sometimes confiding and once, most memorably, confessing a deeply buried secret. Erskine thinks of these voices, 50 in all, as cameos, rather than a chorus. (“I think a chorus conveys a sense of commonality of purpose.”)
Deciding which characters are to be the focal point of a story can be quite an arbitrary thing for a writer, she says. Take a restaurant as the setting for a short story, for example. One writer might choose the table of glamorous women to concentrate on, but another would be drawn to the kitchen porter. In terms of The Benefactors, she says: “What I was thinking was: let’s imagine a world and let’s imagine that the ideas of this book have a relevance to all sorts of different people beyond the ones that I have chosen to make the main characters.
“So, I knew some of [the voices] would be connected quite intimately to the main narrative. Some are connected in terms of theme, some connected in terms of something quite tangential. But overall, I was hoping they were going to enhance the experience, add a sort of richness or texture to the reading experience.” The voices are extraordinarily distinct from each other, I say, even if they only take up half a page. Erskine is pleased: “If these people don’t sound, you know, really quite particular to the individual, there’s no point.”
Erskine’s ability to fully inhabit such a range of characters is partly what makes The Benefactors such a compelling, exhilarating read. All human life is here. Erskine sees it herself as a book “about responsibility. It’s about parenthood. And it’s most importantly about love”.
As a writer, Erskine is fearless: “I like the idea that anything is possible.” And writing should be a fun activity, she asserts. “I don’t have a lot of patience with this idea that, you know, people say they find it so incredibly difficult and dreadful to write. Don’t do it then!”
The Benefactors, Sceptre, 19th June, HB, £18.99, 9781399741668
