Sisterhood, natural catastrophe, and family legacy are at the heart of Caoilinn Hughes’ and Julia Armfield’s new novels. Set against the backdrop of worlds impacted by climate change, both stories poignantly capture a creeping sense of dread for a very uncertain future.

Hughes’ The Alternatives follows three of the four Flattery sisters as their disparate lives converge in the Irish countryside in a search for a fourth sister who doesn’t want to be found. Along the way, they must confront old wounds and shared secrets to kindle the spark of a new beginning.

Meanwhile, Armfield’s Private Rites sees estranged sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes reunited at their family home in the wake of their father’s death. There, in a grand house made of glass, their already fragile relationship threatens to shatter under the pressure of sinister revelations and dark implications for themselves and their imperiled world.

With incisive clarity, Hughes and Armfield give voice to a widespread concern for the current environment while crafting stunning and relatable portraits of dysfunctional families. Together, they’ll discuss their shared anxieties around climate change, our rapidly changing world, and what brings them hope when faced with the potential instability of a future unknown.

Caoilinn Hughes is the author of The Wild Laughter, which won the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award and was longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, and Orchid & the Wasp, which won the Collyer Bristow Prize and was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. She was recently the Oscar Wilde Centre Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, and is currently a Cullman Center Fellow at New York Public Library.

Julia Armfield‘s work has been published in Granta, The White Review and Best British Short Stories 2019 and 2021. In 2019, she was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award. She was longlisted for the Deborah Rogers Award 2018, and won the White Review Short Story Prize 2018 and a Pushcart Prize in 2020. She is the author of salt slow, a collection of short stories, which was longlisted for the Polari Prize 2020 and the Edge Hill Prize 2020. Her debut novel, Our Wives Under The Sea, won the Polari Prize 2023 and was shortlisted for the Foyles Fiction Book of the Year Award 2022.