Early on in Ana Kinsella’s debut novel, one of the principals, John Reddan, asks the other, Frida Slattery, ‘What are you looking for?’ Frida replies, ‘The statue of Mary. There’s always one. Haven’t you noticed?’ This exchange illustrates the book’s near-contemporary Irish setting as well as its position: looking askance at a no-longer-hegemonic Catholic Church yet looking for its resonances all the same. By now in the tentative stages of an on-again, off-again relationship that will span most of the novel’s sixteen-year (and nearly 500-page) duration, John and Frida are in the throes of a countrywide school circuit of their play Graceland, one of a handful of creative projects that punctuate the book’s structure. ‘Hunting for virgins,’ John calls Frida’s game of Mary-spotting. ‘Hunting for Madonnas,’ she counters. Promiscuity and refuge are polar extremes in this story.

Frida Slattery as Herself is a tale of modern romance forged amid the vagaries of a brave new world. John and Frida – playwright and actress, artist and muse – meet in a Dublin pub in 2006 and end up in a Dublin theatre in 2021, putting on the near-eponymous production Frida Slattery Plays Herself. In the interim, they get together, break up and hook up in Dublin, London, New York and LA. The incidental details of their relationship are recognisably quotidian, and yet Kinsella also touches on a broad range of issues – Catholic guilt, #MeToo, Covid-19, emigration. To fold all of this together so fluently in a first novel is admirable.

In so far as the book is about leaving and being elsewhere, it is a parable of modern Ireland – specifically, the Ireland of boom and bust, of the Celtic Tiger and the crash, of secularisation and the enduring spectre of religious habit. Its main locales reveal both past and