A01=Bethany Joy Dawson
absence and loss
ancestral home
Author_Bethany Joy Dawson
book club fiction
Category=FBA
Category=FS
character-driven novel
County Down
end of life reflection
eq_bestseller
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_modern-contemporary
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
family secrets
identity and place
inherited house
inherited past
intergenerational family saga
intimate domestic fiction
Irish countryside
Irish literary fiction
legacy and inheritance
literary fiction
Northern Ireland fiction
personal renewal
psychological family drama
rural Ireland
survival within family
three generations of women
women-centered literary fiction
Product details
- ISBN 9781917000192
- Dimensions: 162 x 240mm
- Publication Date: 14 May 2026
- Publisher: Constellations Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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When Cora inherits a house in rural County Down from a grandmother she never knew, she steps into a family history shaped by absence, silence, and restraint. Ballybrae House is both shelter and a place of renewal, holding the imprints of those who came before and the hope of something new.
Told through the shifting perspectives of three women across generations, Familiar follows Annie as she approaches death and discovers unexpected freedom in letting go; Joyce, her daughter, almost mute with grief, who finds liberation in Cora's arrival; and Cora, who must learn to inhabit a place - and a past - that was deliberately withheld from her, and find the courage to begin again.
Familiar is a story about belonging and the uneasy intimacy of family, asking what it means to survive within inherited structures - and how, at moments of rupture, those structures might be remade.
Told through the shifting perspectives of three women across generations, Familiar follows Annie as she approaches death and discovers unexpected freedom in letting go; Joyce, her daughter, almost mute with grief, who finds liberation in Cora's arrival; and Cora, who must learn to inhabit a place - and a past - that was deliberately withheld from her, and find the courage to begin again.
Familiar is a story about belonging and the uneasy intimacy of family, asking what it means to survive within inherited structures - and how, at moments of rupture, those structures might be remade.
Bethany Joy Dawson holds an MPhil in Creative Writing from Trinity College Dublin and her debut novel, My Father's House, was published in 2013 to critical acclaim. Familiar is her second novel. She is the curator of Upstream, an offering of weekly essays that map the landscape as she sees it – in literary, physical and spiritual ways.
Originally from County Down, she now lives in Sligo with her husband and three children.
