Somewhere by Jessamine O’Connor
Jessamine O’Connor is an accomplished award-winning poet and writer. Her collection Silver Spoon is published by Salmon Press. She has books with Nine Pens Press and the Black Light Engine Room Press, and she is an editor with Drunk Muse Press, as well as The Poet’s Republic. Somewhere is her first novel.
O’Connor’s writing is engaging and full of compassion. While giving voices and lived experiences to myriad characters, she presents fully-rounded images of authentic people and familiar places. Despite being set in a non-specific May to September, Somewhere is clearly contemporary.
The story simultaneously demonstrates how geographically small Dublin really is, and how interwoven seemingly random people’s lives can be. The cumulative effect gives the sense of a series of film clips depicting any given day in the city. I was reminded several times of Douglas Stuart’s characters, Shuggie Bain and Mungo, who similarly bring Glasgow and Scotland into clear view for the reader.
A Poetic Leaning
Unsurprisingly, there’s a poetic leaning to the exquisite prose; some sentences are structured with deliberate spacing between words, others in staccato, all of which work to huge effect in slowing down or speeding up the narrative as necessary.
Above all, O’Connor excels at writing from behind the characters’ eyes with kaleidoscopic detail. We see what’s on the pavement, what’s in the sky and, somehow, we smell traffic fumes and hear city sounds, too. Captivating, visceral micro scenes grab the attention: watching a duck’s ‘petrol-green’ head; being up-close-and-personal with a swan; making coffee in a French Press.
O’Connor doesn’t shy away from staring the polar opposites of despair and hope right in the eye. The story is grungy, yes, shocking even, with devastating, stifling moments, but as the narrative constantly contracts and expands, these moments pass, leaving just enough for readers to feel hopeful about.
Somewhere
The title is ambiguous, slightly vague, or so I thought. And then I realised everyone is trying to get somewhere, needs to be somewhere, is coming from somewhere, or wants to be somewhere, anywhere, other than right here, right now. It’s a fitting title for an extraordinarily powerful debut novel.
Here’s what others have said:
‘Beautifully crafted, devastating and human.’ Una Mannion.
‘A compassionate portrait of addiction, family and love … compulsively readable, it is also full of hope.’ Juliana Adelman.
‘Fresh, candid, and at times unbearably moving. A fine debut.’ Claire Gleeson.
Order your copy of Somewhere online here.
Jo Nestor’s collection Swimming Donkeys won the Roscommon Chapbook Bursary Award 2025. Previously, she won the Leitrim Guardian Literary Award 2020. She is published in the FISH Anthology 2024, SPLONK Issue 12, Roscommon New Writing 2019-23, and several editions of the broadsheet Autumn Leaves. Her short story Violins is not the Answer will be published later this year in the 2026 Cork anthology – From The Well.
She chooses to live in hope.
Read more from Jo Nestor on Writing.ie here.
