A Beautiful Loan

An exceptional, compulsive novel of love, loss and courage. Told in poetic, clear-eyed prose, A Beautiful Loan is heart-breaking but unsentimental, and easily Costello's best work yet -- SINEAD GLEESON
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 -- PAUL LYNCH
A Beautiful Loan is like a beautiful piece of music: true, pure, profound. Anna's quest, in mid-life, 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 -- CLAIRE MESSUD, author of 'This Strange Eventful History'
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 -- MADELEINE THIEN, author of 'The Book of Records'
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 -- ROXANNA ROBINSON, author of 'Leaving'
Praise for Mary Costello: Costello's writing has the kind of urgency that the great problems demand -- ANNE ENRIGHT
I read Academy Street cover to cover in one night, unable to stop . . . [It] brings to mind the elegance of Colm Toibin and the insight of Alice Munro -- MAGGIE O'FARRELL
Clear-eyed and provocative, bruised and bruising . . . a writer at the very top of her game -- EIMEAR McBRIDE
With extraordinary devotion, Mary Costello brings to life a woman who would otherwise have faded into oblivion -- J.M. COETZEE
It is rare that a writer of fiction can evoke such depth of feeling and visceral/moral revulsion as Mary Costello -- JOYCE CAROL OATES