Author Mary Costello: ‘Gaza has disabled me. I think, how could I go into a room and make up stories?’

The writer Mary Costello is sitting in the plush lobby of a Galway city-centre hotel. She is diminutive in stature, smartly dressed, with impeccable long, blonde hair hanging neatly around her shoulders. She drinks mint tea as we discuss her new novel, A Beautiful Loan, an intimate portrait of one woman’s journey towards self-discovery. It is Costello’s fifth book since her 2012 debut collection, The China Factory.

“It looks like I’ve been productive,” she says. But in reality she has been gripped by a crippling writer’s block for the past number of years. “I haven’t written a word of fiction, not one sentence, since the genocide started. I have been utterly broken by Gaza.”

A Beautiful Loan tells the story of a woman called Anna. When we first meet her at the age of 19, she is a young, naive woman from Galway living and working in Dublin and in love with a much older, emotionally withdrawn man. Over the course of more than two decades, we follow Anna through relationships, marriage, loss and a growing self-awareness as she seeks answers to life’s big questions in philosophy, literature, music, religion and science.

The book feels like a perfect combination of the free-flowing philosophical inquiry of her second novel, The River Capture (2019) and the pared-back prose and emotional storytelling of her debut novel, Academy Street (2014).