Awards

• Short-listed for Irish Book Awards - Newcomer of the Year 2025 (UK)

Overview

A FINANCIAL TIMES BEST DEBUT OF 2025 Mairéad works all hours in a run-down West End theatre's wardrobe department, her whole existence made up of threads and needles, running errands to mend shoes, fixing broken zips and handwashing underwear. She must also do her best to avoid groping hands backstage and the terrible bullying of the show's producer. But, despite her skill and growing experience, half of Mairéad remains in her windy, hedge-filled home in Ireland, and the life she abandoned there. In noughties London, she has the potential to be somebody completely new - why, then, does she feel so stuck? Between the bustling side streets of Soho, and the wet grass of Leitrim and Donegal, Mairéad is caught, running from the girl she was but unable to reveal the woman she'd hoped to become. Told with rare honesty and equal measures of warmth and bite, The Wardrobe Department is a story about reckoning with the past, finding the courage to change the present - and asking what comes next.

Full Product Details

9781805302360

Table of Contents

Reviews

Elaine Garvey is a tremendous new talent in Irish writing - I'm certain the reader will recognise inside half a page that she's the real thing -- KEVIN BARRY The Wardrobe Department is at once familiar and surprising, knotty and tender, tough and beguiling, and its author a sure hand with a light touch . . . Garvey [is] one of those enviable writers whose piercing eye for human contradiction and self-sabotage never dims her affection for the souls she's so beautifully painted -- LISA McINERNEY A gift of a novel. I felt relieved after reading it, like I had been hungry for some elusive feeling, and finally found something that hit the spot. There are sentences in this book that will keep me going for a long time -- LOUISE NEALON From fine stitches to generational patterns, this book is a deft and graceful exploration of the roles we play - and the cost of breaking free -- SHEILA ARMSTRONG Delicate and fierce, heartbreaking and ultimately hopeful. An astoundingly good novel. The writing is as sharp and sure as a dress-maker's scissors -- DANIELLE McLAUGHLIN A precise and beguiling novel that's alive with human insight . . . Garvey's bone-dry wit and emotional precision give us a book that's full of joy, despair and hope, just like the life it portrays so truly. A thrilling debut from a supremely talented writer -- STEPHEN WALSH

Author Information

Elaine Garvey is from Co. Sligo, Ireland. She completed an M.Phil. in Creative Writing in Trinity College, Dublin in 2000. Her short stories have been published in the Dublin Review and Winter Papers. She has worked as a programme co-ordinator at the Stinging Fly, was awarded an agility grant for her writing and has recently been selected as a participant on a basic income scheme for artists by the Irish Department of Arts. The Wardrobe Department is her first novel.

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