Confessions, Catherine Airey’s debut novel, begins with death. Cora, an Irish girl living in Brooklyn, describes how her artist mother, Máire, died when she was nine, her ‘body washed up in Flushing Creek’. Her father, Michael, died seven years afterwards in the World Trade Center on 9/11. Following his death, Cora receives a letter from her mother’s sister, Róisin, whom she has never met. Róisin explains that she is now responsible for Cora, who returns to rural Ireland to be with her aunt. 

There’s something exciting about Airey’s aspirations. She has written a novel that is broad in timeframe, range of topics and characters. Some parts are written in the first person and some in the second; one section consists of the instructions for a video game and a brief portion is in epistolary form. The narration is shared between Cora, her daughter Lyca, Róisin and Máire, and the story moves back and forward in time. 

But the swirl of Confessions is too much. Airey doesn’t treat all of the novel’s many subjects (abortion, rape, loss, mental illness, to name but a few) with the depth that they warrant. Cora describes a painting of her mother’s made at ‘the peak of the Aids crisis’ as