The Benefactors

Picked as a 2025 Observer Best New Novelist, the highly anticipated debut from one of the most exciting voices in contemporary fiction.

Riveting . . . a polyphonic drama of money and class . . . Erskine's eye for detail keeps us rapt

This Belfast novel has the style of Woolf but the heart of Dickens . . . Erskine - a gifted short story writer who has been longlisted for the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award - deploys a style closer to Virginia Woolf than to HBO, delivering scattershot glimpses of events through the eyes of a broad cast of characters . . . for all the formal subtlety and fragmentation of this impressive novel, then, it is amazing to see there is such a warmly conventional heart beating beneath the Woolfian multiple perspectives and the deliberate haziness with which Erskine depicts the novel's central act of class-based injustice

This polyphonic portrait of class, power and social exclusion in Northern Ireland - the debut novel from an award-winning short story writer - is centred on the assault of a teenage girl, and the reactions of the boys' parents. Erskine is a nimble, prodigiously talented author: funny and brutal by turns, with an extraordinary immediacy .

Sparklingly polyphonic . . . The Benefactors might sound like one of those ripped-from-the-headlines, state-of-the-young-people, how-would-you-feel-if-this-happened-to-you sort of novels that publishers try to sell to book clubs - the sort of novel that is supposed to provoke a meaningful discussion about "issues". (Side-note: a good novel is itself a meaningful discussion of "issues", aka the varieties of human experience.) But the effect of Erskine's polyphonic method is to undermine op-ed simplicities, to insist on complexity . As one of her anonymous voices puts it, "no one should presume anything at any point about anybody" . . . magnificently enigmatic, persuasive, fresh. It takes a good writer to mobilise such a range of voices, moods, perceptions. It takes a very good writer indeed to offer us characters who, like actual people, speak so beautifully for themselves

Northern Ireland's most exciting novelist . . . a polyphonic narrative about Belfast, class, parenting, and the aftermath of a sexual assault, served up with an undertow of politics . . . an absorbing and clever structure that feels fresh and exciting

Wendy Erskine's first novel arrives after two collections that stake her claim to be the most talented Irish short story writer to emerge from either side of the border in the past decade . . . the voice is intimate and flexible, inviting us to ridicule a character's failings one minute and understand them the next, offering and then resisting caricature. Through the interplay with the first-person vignettes we gain a panorama of character that includes what these people no longer know about themselves . . . The reader will come away from the book with a sense of a writer of an unrivalled range of imaginative empathy , and of a city teeming with joy and sadness.

A cacophony of voices meet in The Benefactors in connected and often seemingly utterly disconnected ways, all of them given Erskine's trademark attention to character , all of them like mini short stories of their own . . . t he success of The Benefactors is the way it treads across familiar fare . . . and tackles them in surprising ways

A truly special author - so special that you want to keep her for yourself . . . with a voice that is crystal clear and a viewpoint that takes in the world's cruelties and joys, Erskine's talent shines in The Benefactors . . . one of [Ireland's] finest contemporary writers

I'm already hooked

The dialogue and the descriptive prose, showing the inner and outer worlds of the novel, are extraordinary . I think this will be one of the most admired and talked-about books this year

I couldn't put this book down .,Wendy has skilfully written herself out of the story completely, her hand has disappeared. As a reader, you are totally transported into these characters lives. They are living people and I missed them when I finished

Deftly tackle[s] dark subject matters

Debut novel by the acclaimed short-story writer about class and family in Northern Ireland

Wendy Erskine's writing is inimitable - so fresh, so sharp, so wry, so alive; so much contemporary fiction feels flat and fake in comparison. In all of its glorious polyphony, The Benefactors brims with humanity . It's got snap, it's got sparkle, it's got soul. All of Belfast is here, all of life. I adored it.

An excellent novel , all those voices so vivid and precise, appropriately startling at times and incredibly smart and timely on class and privilege

A truly remarkable novel - The Benefactors is both intimate and panoramic, full of clear-eyed compassion and wry wit, and with a cast of characters so vividly drawn it feels like you've known them all your life. This is powerful, masterful storytelling by one of the most exciting writers at work today

The Benefactors is f antastic . It's really stuck with me since I finished it

A powerful, moving, compelling, utterly enthralling debut novel from the excellent Wendy Erskine. The Benefactors follows the fallout from one young woman's awful experience of the young men around her, and explores the many ways in which lies are told, perpetuated, and excused. Wendy Erskine understands young people in all their complicated awfulness and brilliance, and the way she inhabits and carries such a range of troubled voices in this novel is a wonder. We're all better off for being able to read a novel as rich as this

'Wendy Erskine is off doing her own, consummate thing. The Benefactors is a novel as perfectly pitched , surefooted, and charged with feeling as her gleaming, precise stories

Wendy Erskine flourishes her captivating style in The Benefactors , with a depth of insight which at times feels like epiphany . Erskine actualises riveting, propulsive humanity in this mosaic of a community, achieving a distinction of narrative empathy that gleams on the page. The prose conveys profound insight with such lightness, the characters a richness of nuance and rare humour. The Benefactors is an essential novel, and Wendy Erskine an essential novelist. It is an inspired testament to survival - I was incredibly moved by it.

Books are made of words. And sentences. Of stories and sounds and of voices. The Benefactors is further proof that Erskine is a true master of all the above. There are absolutely loads of words in this book - every single one of them is well chosen - because Wendy Erskine chose them. The clue is in the title - with The Benefactors , Wendy Erskine has given us a gift

I found Wendy Erskine's The Benefactors to be a profound and memorable novel. Its acuity is matched by the brilliance of its prose

I miss it already. Even when they were being horrible bastards the characters were stirring my heart. Wendy evokes the grim gradations of class and wealth with such a clear eye and unerring hand. She's an incredible writer. All these voices so true and so loud in my ear. What a beautiful, hilarious blast of brilliance

A polyphonic, moving, funny masterpiece . A joy to read sentences like these from a writer as talented as this

The Benefactors is an astonishing novel from a writer at the height of her powers . There's not a sentence I don't believe, or a character I don't feel something for. Whole worlds are conjured, and through these worlds, a variousness of voices and perspectives that bring to life a plethora of lived experiences, often contradictory, but deeply human. Wendy Erskine is a true artist, and what a joy it is to read her

A novel of exquisite detail and endless humanity. Even in their darkest moments, Erskine never lets go of her characters, never lets them be anything but alive on the page. I won't soon recover, and don't really want to, from the clarity and cold power of this book

What a voice. What assurance and execution. Wendy Erskine writes like nobody else. The Benefactors is a masterful, memorable, electric novel that conveys a community of people and all their dramas pitch-perfectly, seemingly without manipulation, because the craft is deft and the feeling is real as all hell

The Benefactors is a novel of trauma that speaks from all of its perspectives simultaneously. In its lack of judgement, and in the redemptive joy and sadness of its telling, it is a profound work of art

Wendy Erskine is one of the best writers working in Ireland right now and The Benefactors is all her own, astute and full of feeling

Wendy Erskine is a formidable writer, an extraordinary, deliciously vivid storyteller with characters that leap off the page. The Benefactors is an outstanding debut novel , packed with sharp truths and succinct details exploring the way people judge each other, hurt each other and learn to love each other

In her first novel, [Erskine] revels in the possibilities of an expanded cast, yet controls the pace and framing with all the precision of a miniaturist. The result is a novel that feels like a balancing act: at once sprawling and meticulous, polyphonic and tonally coherent. The Benefactors is ambitiously structured, but functions in some ways as a short story with a novel around it. At the book's heart is a pivotal, life-altering moment. Gracefully flowing into and out of it are the day-to-day lives that the moment both springs from and distorts, rendered in a tapestry of third-person narration and unattributed interjections of monologue - a kind of community chorus, commenting and adding colour . . . Erskine's great gift is for character. Not a single figure in this novel feels contrived ; all are complicatedly flawed and empathetically rendered . . . a work of great assurance and precision

It's no surprise that her excellent debut novel somehow manages to make room for more than 50 characters, thanks to a polyphonic structure stringing loosely connected cameos around the main drama . . . a bold narrative experiment, given legs by Erskine's near-magical ability to imagine her way into the tiniest details of everyday life .

A manifesto for class warfare; a study of sex and money; and a portrait of Belfast

One of the best books of the year

A stand-out debut . . . maybe it's the cacophony of voices, but Jeffrey Eugenides kept popping into my head. I'd highly recommend this vibrant, sometimes hilarious, at times bleak novel set in Belfast, featuring a rich cast of distinctly 'Erskinesque' characters

This blistering debut novel from the acclaimed short-story writer Wendy Erskine circles around a case of sexual assault, expanding into a polyphonic story that is at once an evocative fictional oral history of contemporary Belfast, a powerful depiction of trauma and a provocative exploration of social power dynamics . . . The Benefactors is vital reading, both for its lively energy and its political weight

You think you know the Belfast novel - it's all peace walls, sectarian divides, centuries-old divisions. But Wendy Erskine's The Benefactors looks at something quite different: how money divides us. It tells the story of Misty, from a poor background, who is sexually assaulted by three posh boys, and how the system is balanced against her when she tries to seek justice. Erskine's style is fragmentary and experimental, but the morals behind it are pleasingly old-fashioned - our enamoured reviewer compared her to both Virginia Woolf and Charles Dickens.

I loved Wendy Erskine's The Benefactors - brimming over with the glorious, complex humanity of its city

Wendy Erskine is the author of two short story collections, Sweet Home and Dance Move . She was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize, longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, and she received the Butler Literary Award and the Edge Hill Readers' Choice Award. She edited the art anthology well I just kind of like it . A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she is a frequent broadcaster and interviewer, and works as a secondary school teacher in Belfast. The Benefactors is her debut novel.