This episodic, multi-layered debut crosses decades and continents to shine a light on the universality and uniqueness of women’s experience

Catherine Airey’s debut novel opens in New York on 9/11. Sixteen-year-old Cora, who is playing truant, watches the news from her apartment, and knows that her father is dead. Michael was an accountant who worked on the 104th floor of the North Tower. Cora’s mother Máire died seven years earlier, so she is now an orphan.

Cora tells us all this herself. Absconding from her convent school, she has the jaded, unworldly voice of the affluent Manhattan teen (in fiction, at least – The Catcher in the Rye, which is referenced, or Gossip Girl). This is her recollection of her mother’s death: “The morgue had comfy armchairs in the lobby, and I can remember being annoyed that it didn’t take longer for my father to identify the body. I was reading Little Women and would have quite happily sat there all day. I was nine.”