And as Rachel's time to depart from the island nears, and Aoileann father and grandmother find out she has been interacting with Rachel and her child, the story comes to a satisfyingly disturbing conclusion. First is the monotony of Aoileann's existence and the unrelenting drudgery and normative horror that is her everyday. She has never known different. Her days consist of performing the act of caring for her "bed-thing" mother. She doesn't live, so much as she exists. Her life is a repetition of these uncaring acts of caring for the bed-thing that birthed her. Aoileann and Móraí no longer see Aoibh as human, but as a thing, a chore, a horror. During the early chapters, I found myself musing that there were parallels between this book and The Colony by Audrey Magee, with both set on a remote island off the coast of Ireland and featuring a resident artist character. I think they make good companion reads but do steel yourself for some seriously disturbing content. This isn’t work lovingly done, however, as it is clear the pair hate the silent, seemingly immobile mother. They call her "the bed-thing" and "it", and the only time Aoileann calls her "mother" is with a sardonic edge.

Those we did understand seemed unperturbed by what appears to have been a mass death of 21 people since March of ’31. My mother. At night, my mother creaks. The house creaks along with her. Through our thin shared wall, I can hear the makings of my mother gurgle through her body, just like the water in the walls of the house. I hate the sound. In the daytime, it is covered, wrapped up in the radio and the wind and the low hum of the electricity. But at night, in the silence, her insides gush and she seems alive in a way that, during daylight, she does not. The gush forces thoughts of her effluent, her needs; of the things my grandmother takes care of but that I will have to do someday soon. I don’t want to, which makes me feel bad. I hate her body–it’s an awful thing. They resentfully clean her and change her nappies, hurl insults at her, talk over her and treat her in ways that are incredibly emotionally difficult to read. and make us aware of how inhumane they are in their treatment. We are given no explicit reason as to what happened to Aoileann’s mother or why, but all we are witness to is the incredible anger and resentment that both women – but especially Aoileann have towards her.Aoileann and Móraí, her taciturn grandmother, spend their days secretly tending to “the bed-thing”, Aoileann’s mother, the survivor of a private disaster. Aoileann loathes her mother, a hatred manifest in endless daily cruelties. In Where I End, the bedbound parent is a mute and incapacitated mother, whose every need must be met by her teenage daughter, Aoileann, and mother-in-law, Móraí. Set in a remote corner of a remote island, the book is a horror about a young woman’s attempts to find motherly love, and to get to the bottom of family secrets that made her who she is. Ideas of care and neglect, isolation, family, and so on run throughout, though they are approached obliquely and it’s up to the reader to draw their own conclusions about what’s being said. In contrast, the bed-bound mother is decrepit and withered. "If she were not so empty, I would be full", Aoileann thinks of her. Between the two, White explores the two extremes of motherhood: creation and destruction.

If you’ve read more than one review of Where I End, you’ll have seen it repeatedly described as visceral, gruesome, chilling, unsettling, dark, twisted, and horrific. These are also my descriptions of the novel. It is a novel full of body horror. It is also full of psychological horror. It is bone-chillingly disturbing and made my skin crawl multiple times.All of this is near the beginning of the story, where the protagonist, a nineteen-year-old girl who was born on the island, talks increasingly about death.

Sophie White (born 1985) is an Irish author, journalist and podcaster. She is the co-host of the podcasts Mother of Pod and The Creep Dive. Sophie writes a weekly column ‘Nobody Tells You’ for the Sunday Independent LIFE magazine and her journalism has been nominated for numerous media awards. TV adaptations of her first two books are in development and she co-hosts the chart-topping comedy podcasts, Mother of Pod and The Creep Dive. I coloured it because my kids kept getting nits. It’s so glamorous!” she says, with typical candour. “It took about five hours. I was like: how do people do this on the regular shift? But I sat there and wrote my column while they did it.”I do think this book may be a hard read for people who are family carers, and therefore I wouldn't recommend it to these people. There are some moments in this that made me so uncomfortable due to the way Aoileann and her grandmother treated her mother - they kept her as comfortable as possible, and cared for her in the way they knew how but there were moments that made you truly wonder if she was trapped in a terrible silent prison of her own self. And as Aoileann's obsession deepens, her behaviour towards her mother becomes more resentful and cruel. The following day, my online conversation continued, and I announced that I’d finished the book: ‘Ooooh, it’s dark …’ I offered. ‘I’ve never read a horror story like it before … omg, it put my teeth on edge … there are some mental images that are hard to shake … remember when Joey from Friends put a book in the freezer? That’s how I feel right now …’ What you rarely see in literature, however, is an honest glimpse at the brutal and grotesque obliteration of a woman’s body, as well as her psyche, as she becomes a mother – something Sophie White explores in her haunting new book. Aoileann lives on a remote island with her Móraí and her mother, who will not, or cannot, leave her bed. Having moved to the mainland, Aoileann's father, whom she calls Dada, visits once a month. The other islanders go out of their way to avoid Aoileann for reasons she does not fully understand because they have always reacted this way to her. The house in which Aoileann is at the furthest, least accessible, part of the island and its windows have been boarded up with stones. Aoileann lives with her paternal grandmother, an islander, who she calls Móraí, and her mother, originally from the mainland. But no-one on the island knows that her mother is there, believing her to have died around the time Aoileann was born, and she is bed-bound and dumb, seemingly in some form of permanent post-natal depression, and is treated by Aoileann and Móraí as little more than an animal, or perhaps, even worse an object.

I think when you have a baby, you suddenly are hit by your own terrible power, and how your work from then on is to not harm your children, whether overtly or passively. And I think that’s something that constantly interests me in my work.” As a long-term Creep™, I thought I had a fairly good on handle on how dark Sophie could go. I greatly underestimated her, and while I really liked her other books, I feel like this is it, this is what she can write better than anyone else. The horror of humanity. Teenager Aoileann has never left the island. Her silent, bed-bound mother is the survivor of a private disaster no one will speak about. Aoileann desperately wants a family, and when Rachel and her newborn son move to the island, Aoileann finds a focus for her relentless love.

The sea is death reanimated. Down under the shimmying surface, the currents conduct the corpses and they sway in a dance, ringed around the island’s underbelly. In a horrifying twist, it’s revealed that the mother has been scratching signs into the floorboards.