The Benefactors

Longlisted for the 2026 Women's Prize for Fiction

By: Wendy Erskine

Narrated by: Various, Wendy Erskine

AN OBSERVER BEST DEBUT NOVEL 2025
SHORTLISTED FOR NOVEL OF THE YEAR AT THE AN POST IRISH BOOK AWARDS
LONGLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE

'What a joy it is to read'
Michael Magee, author of Close to Home

'I couldn't put this book down'
Sheena Patel, author of I'm A Fan

'Powerful, moving, compelling, utterly enthralling'
Jon McGregor, author of Reservoir 13

'A prodigiously talented author: funny and brutal by turns'
Guardian

'The style of Woolf but the heart of Dickens'
Sunday Times

'Vital reading'
Spectator

Meet Frankie, Miriam and Bronagh: three very different women from Belfast, but all mothers to eighteen-year-old boys.

Gorgeous Frankie, now married to a wealthy, older man, grew up in care. Miriam has recently lost her beloved husband Kahlil in ambiguous circumstances. Bronagh, the CEO of a children's services charity, loves celebrity and prestige. When their sons are accused of sexually assaulting a friend, Misty Johnston, they'll come together to protect their children, leveraging all the powers they possess. But on her side, Misty has the formidable matriarch, Nan D, and her father, taxi-driver Boogie: an alliance not so easily dismissed.

Brutal, tender and rigorously intelligent, The Benefactors is a daring, multi-voice presentation of modern-day Northern Ireland. It is also very funny.©2025 Wendy Erskine (P)2025 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Critic reviews

Riveting . . . a polyphonic drama of money and class . . . Erskine's eye for detail keeps us rapt (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 (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. (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 (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 (Susie Mesure)