Claudine Cullimore's debut, Lola Comes Home, recounts Lola Flanagan's return to an Ireland in full bloom. Ten years as a nanny in Brussels have armed Lola only with an inferiority complex. Her return home is partly a grabbing at her future, partly a retreat to the comforts of childhood. Though half-French and bilingual, Lola is acutely conscious of her stunted education, and bewildered by the changes during her absence from Ireland: Dublin is hip, speaking Irish is cool and everybody except Lola is a professional. Well, everybody except Lola's sisters, Perri (gay, feisty, urban) and Belle (fragile flowerchild).
Lola is not a chick-lit novel about girls in flats who want boyfriends. Some familiar ingredients are here (it's still about a girl trying to decide what to do with her life), but in sometimes surreal combinations. Much of Cullimore's best writing is about sisters, Perri, Perri's lover Consumpta and their embryonic girl band. Perri's truculent approach to their boss and the landlord are wonderfully entertaining, as is her scathing critique of Lola's romantic fascination with priests. Alongside this upbeat city tale runs the meanwhile-down-the-country story of Belle, which is quaint, even Victorian. Each sister pairs up with a schooldays' companion, oddly entangling a feisty new style with a nostalgia for safer days before everyone, including the Irish economy, grew up. Cullimore has an eccentric, whimsical style that is all her own. Penguin is making much of her fresh, funny Irish voice for the 18-30 market, and we can expect to see much more of her as she hones her skills.
Kathy Cremin is an academic and critic