Ruth McKee: Wild Iris [2026]

Wild Iris


''Wild Iris is wonderfully inventive, by turns grim as a Belfast Sunday and raucous as a Dublin Saturday night. Ruth McKee writes with dash and daring, and the result is a funny, moving and vastly entertaining novel. Chapeau!''
John Banville

Set over an Easter weekend, Wild Iris follows Eve as she enters a psychological crisis: will she reconnect with an old lover, or end her life? We stay with Eve over the course of a day—her 42nd birthday—and into the night, as the past bubbles into the present. As a child Eve is anxious and lonely, but with a rich interior world, fascinated by language. She is raised by Gerty, a strict, taciturn Presbyterian, which only adds to her feeling of being out of place: everyone seems to have a template for living but her. Then she meets Louise and their intense friendship lasts into university, when Johnny arrives on the scene and splinters their trust. At Eve’s 21st birthday party, home from a night of drinking and drugs, a tragedy happens that will shape the rest of Eve’s life.

''Wild Iris is an accomplished and utterly captivating novel. It''s a deeply moving and visceral read rich in language, metaphor and detail yet also heartbreakingly humane. McKee has drawn a vivid and unsettling portrait of a woman tottering on the edge of herself.'' Jan Carson

''All good writers command the speed at which they write and we read. It takes remarkable skill indeed to fully engage the reader with the story of a woman calmly reliving her life, in minute and unsparing forensic detail, before she chooses to take her leave. To hold us in profound sympathy with the despair of the main character, and at the same time to paint a picture of a world rich in joy and beauty, that''s a remarkable thing in itself. McKee''s very considerable achievement is to make us read on, knowing full well how it''s all going to end, to bind us fully into a story whose ending is inevitable, to hold our attention, enthralled and appalled, right down to the final full stop. ''Theo Dorgan

''Wild Iris is a devastating and brilliant novel. It''s incisive, unflinching, witty and wistful – and so full of love, language, and beauty that to read it is to be swept along in a fast flowing current.'' Gill Perdue

''Wid Iris is a delight of a novel. Ruth McKee gifts us the troubled and fully-realised universe of Eve’s life – filled with luminous detail and a voice that is tender and intimate and pitch perfect. A beautifully written debut.'' Catherine Dunne

It will appeal to readers who like the novels of Claire Keegan, Sebastian Barry and John McGahern.

Wild Iris
Author: Ruth McKee
Cover design: Marie Lane