Catherine Airey Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Catherine Airey is a published author.

She herself grew up in England with a family who came from mixed English and Irish descent. Today the author happily resides in County Cork. Her debut fictional novel is titled Confessions.

Confessions is a 2025 novel by Catherine Airey. Readers and writers as well as critics alike have praised this book and found it to be a fantastic first novel. Author Miranda Cowley Heller has called the book a ‘remarkable debut’, saying the read is ‘complex and compulsive’ and gets to the bottom of twists and revelations ‘among three generations of women’ with ‘elegance and urgency’.

Readers who are looking for a debut book that is absorbing and ambitious will find it in Confessions. This is also a great work to read if you liked books such as Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, or The Goldfinch. The plot follows along with three different generations of women, moving from New York to rural Ireland and then coming back again.

The place is New York City, and the story is currently taking place in late September of 2001. The terrorist event of 9/11 has happened and shaken everyone in the city and around the nation and even the world up. Now the walls and various open spaces in the city are covered with the paper printed photos of those who have gone missing and have not yet been accounted for.

Cora Brady’s father is among their number, thanks to the poster that she had made up. It is now sitting among the others, the paper carefully taped to visible places where it can be seen such as columns and bridges. Then she gets a letter from an aunt in Ireland that she didn’t know she had. She receives the offer to come and start a new life. But the name does make Cora think of a videocassette game she played when she was young where two sisters have to rescue the students of a boarding school.

The setting now moves to County Donegal in 1974. This is where a strange group of artists who are referred to as the ‘Screamers’ come to Burtonport. They decide to move into the old schoolhouse, which is located a little way down the road from the place that Roisin lives in with Moira, her older sister.

Cruel and kind in turns, Moira may be her sister and a brilliant artist but she also is something of an enigma to her younger sister. Roisin finds Moira to be an utter mystery. Roisin finds Moira’s relationship with Michael (the boy next door) to be equally washed in mystery.

The Screamers decide that it is time to hire an artist in residence. Roisin tries to get Michael’s help in order to get Moira the job. This puts into motion a series of events that they could not have predicted and that will not only put an ocean itself between the two sisters but ultimately could tear them apart for good.

The story then moves to Burtonport in 2018. Lyca Brady is a woman who resides in a huge old house along with Cora, her mother, and Ro, their great aunt. Ireland has just legalized getting an abortion. At the same time, Lyca is doing what she can to try and find herself and who she is, working to excavate an identity that exists outside of the world of her mother’s activism.

Then Lyca gets a message she did not expect from a friend from her childhood. The message ends up compelling her to look through the strange attic of the house, searching. She looks through its collection of old medical equipment, all of the paperwork that has been piled up, and the old boxes covered with dusty video games from the past. There she actually finds secrets that have been hidden for decades and that might have been better off without anyone knowing about them in the first place.

This is an incredible debut that tells the story of fate, family, revelation, survival and more. It takes a look at the seriousness of the past and how it makes its way through the different generations. It is always present and in play, even when it has been forgotten or buried away in the hopes that it would never come up again.

So many readers, authors and critics have enjoyed this book. Anna Fitzgerald called the book ‘Brilliantly conceived and magnificently executed’, bragging that she could not put it down and commenting that the book is the work of a debut novelist but ‘feels like the work of a seasoned and highly accomplished author’. Grab yourself a copy of Confessions to move through three generations of women and find out what a high quality debut novel can be!