A Beautiful Loan
2026In 1985 Dublin, nineteen-year-old Anna Hughes is in thrall to Peter Gallagher, an older, worldly man. Anna is introverted and naïve, and Peter's experience, wide circle of friends and thirst for adventure captivate her. Her obsessive longing for him leads to marriage and, eventually, a crushing betrayal. As Anna's life becomes less predictable, she uncovers deeper layers of herself. Her journey gives an intimate portrait of a woman embracing herself as she is, claiming the life she yearns for.
Praise
Costello is one of Ireland's greatest writers . . . Her prose is precise and focused and, like a stiletto blade, sinks deep . . . This is a big book in a small package, about one woman's growth.
A faithful, poetic exploration of the multitudes we contain and what it means to be human. . . . the significance and profundity [Costello] renders to each and every life is a measure of her depth of attention, and perhaps why there is no greater chronicler of the inner life at this moment.
A Beautiful Loan is like a beautiful piece of music: true, pure, profound. Anna's quest, in midlife, to understand herself and the forces that have shaped her thus far, moves and compels. The spirit of Camus, that humane existentialist, hovers over the novel like hope. I am filled with admiration for Mary Costello.
Mary Costello's A Beautiful Loan creates a gripping and unsparing portrait of Anna Hughes, whose longing to find 'safety and oneness,' and to submit to love, deepens as both inner and outer worlds close in. This unsettling novel opened before me like a Rorschach test, troubling all my interpretations.
A Beautiful Loan is a quietly devastating psychological novel about a woman's search for love, meaning and selfhood. . . . Told in Anna's first-person voice and in the present tense, the novel offers an intimate portrait of her inner and outer worlds. On the surface, all seems calm as she recounts her journey from circumspect young teacher to mature woman, yet an undercurrent of unease runs throughout, bubbling up in unsettling moments of insight that give the writing subtle intensity.
Mary Costello is a writer of a rare and exquisite sensitivity — intimate, piercing, death-haunted — with sentences that can turn on a pin into vastness.
This beautiful book has a hurrying heartbeat like a drum, hurrying us toward something we can't bear to learn. Mary Costello's writing is rich in knowing, in yearning, in grief, in a deep understanding of the heart.
An exceptional, compulsive novel of love, loss, and courage. Told in poetic, clear-eyed prose, A Beautiful Loan is heartbreaking but unsentimental, and easily Mary Costello's best work yet.