The Benefactors By Wendy Erskine

Riveting . . . a polyphonic drama of money and class . . . Erskine's eye for detail keeps us rapt
Observer – Anthony Cummins, 10 Best Debut Novelists for 2025

This Belfast novel has the style of Woolf but the heart of Dickens . . . Erskine – a gifted short story writer who has been longlisted for the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award – deploys a style closer to Virginia Woolf than to HBO, delivering scattershot glimpses of events through the eyes of a broad cast of characters . . . for all the formal subtlety and fragmentation of this impressive novel, then, it is amazing to see there is such a warmly conventional heart beating beneath the Woolfian multiple perspectives and the deliberate haziness with which Erskine depicts the novel's central act of class-based injustice
Sunday Times – Robert Collins

This polyphonic portrait of class, power and social exclusion in Northern Ireland – the debut novel from an award-winning short story writer – is centred on the assault of a teenage girl, and the reactions of the boys' parents. Erskine is a nimble, prodigiously talented author: funny and brutal by turns, with an extraordinary immediacy.
Guardian – Summer reading: the 50 hottest books to read now

Sparklingly polyphonic . . . The Benefactors might sound like one of those ripped-from-the-headlines, state-of-the-young-people, how-would-you-feel-if-this-happened-to-you sort of novels that publishers try to sell to book clubs – the sort of novel that is supposed to provoke a meaningful discussion about “issues”. (Side-note: a good novel is itself a meaningful discussion of “issues”, aka the varieties of human experience.) But the effect of Erskine's polyphonic method is to undermine op-ed simplicities, to insist on complexity. As one of her anonymous voices puts it, “no one should presume anything at any point about anybody” . . . magnificently enigmatic, persuasive, fresh. It takes a good writer to mobilise such a range of voices, moods, perceptions. It takes a very good writer indeed to offer us characters who, like actual people, speak so beautifully for themselves
Irish Times – Kevin Power

Northern Ireland's most exciting novelist . . . a polyphonic narrative about Belfast, class, parenting, and the aftermath of a sexual assault, served up with an undertow of politics . . . an absorbing and clever structure that feels fresh and exciting
Daily Telegraph – Susie Mesure

Wendy Erskine's first novel arrives after two collections that stake her claim to be the most talented Irish short story writer to emerge from either side of the border in the past decade . . . the voice is intimate and flexible, inviting us to ridicule a character's failings one minute and understand them the next, offering and then resisting caricature. Through the interplay with the first-person vignettes we gain a panorama of character that includes what these people no longer know about themselves . . . The reader will come away from the book with a sense of a writer of an unrivalled range of imaginative empathy, and of a city teeming with joy and sadness.
Financial Times – Luke Brown

A cacophony of voices meet in The Benefactors in connected and often seemingly utterly disconnected ways, all of them given Erskine's trademark attention to character, all of them like mini short stories of their own . . . the success of The Benefactors is the way it treads across familiar fare . . . and tackles them in surprising ways
Harper’s Bazaar – Marie-Claire Chappet, 5 Debut Female Authors to Read in 2025

A truly special author – so special that you want to keep her for yourself . . . with a voice that is crystal clear and a viewpoint that takes in the world's cruelties and joys, Erskine's talent shines in The Benefactors . . . one of [Ireland's] finest contemporary writers
Irish Independent – Aoife Barry