Nesting by Roisín O’Donnell review – a tense portrait of coercive control

Trapped between a controlling partner and a housing system in crisis, a mother in Dublin struggles to protect her children and herself

About a quarter of the way through Roisín O’Donnell’s unbearably tense debut novel, the protagonist finds herself in the foyer of a Dublin hotel. She picks up a& brochure, which advises her to “escape the pressures of everyday life at the Hotel Eden”; the problem is that& Ciara and her two young daughters are& not trying to escape everyday stresses, but Ciara’s coercive and domineering husband – and crucially, this time they are trying to& stay away for good.

Ireland’s housing crisis means there is nowhere, physically, for them to go. Ciara’s family are based in the UK and Ryan has put a block on the girls’ passports, while his controlling ways have cut Ciara off from all her friends. She is also completely financially dependent on him. What follows, then, is a nightmarish attempt to navigate the housing system – a series of cramped waiting rooms and complex forms and unanswered phone calls, which could be described as Kafkaesque, except Josef K didn’t also have to keep a two- and a four-year-old fed, washed and entertained while schlepping between dead-end court hearings.