Bina

Starred review from January 11, 2021
Schofield’s enthralling latest focuses on 74-year-old Bina, a character from her debut, Malarky. Here, Bina writes a tale of female camaraderie, domestic abuse, and legal woes on the back of receipts and bills while lying in bed, accused of assisting in the death of her ill best friend, Phil. Fanatics she refers to as “crusties” keep vigil outside her home in Ireland, while inside, Bina tells her story in bursts, with sentences broken into poetic shapes and pages often left half empty. She writes about Eddie, the violent nephew of a deceased friend, who moved in, taking over her house and entangling himself in a hospital waste-dumping scheme before hightailing it to Canada. Bina also recalls “The Tall Man,” the shadowy leader of a euthanasia group, who recruits Bina and sets her on a journey of helping others die under the guise of a volunteer position with Meals on Wheels. Yet at the center of the novel are Bina’s memories of her friendship with Phil, who acts as Bina’s sounding board for her persistent, overactive consciousness and is “great company even when was moaning and deluded.” It’s this bond that makes Schofield’s novel shine. Intriguingly crafted and surprisingly funny, Schofield continues to produce work that challenges conventions and enthralls readers. Agent: Alba Ziegler-Bailey, the Wylie Agency.

Starred review from March 15, 2021
An elderly woman in western Ireland holds up her life as a cautionary tale. Partway through the tale told by Schofield's garrulous 74-year-old narrator, she reflects on what her story could be if she were a woman with plenty of time left to her: "She'd lace up paragraphs that would absorb you and you'd believe her, because you're easy this way. I am not that woman. I'm not easy." She's right: Bina and her story are anything but easy. The story of her later life unspools, often meandering down the page in broken lines like poetry (an effect achieved because she's partly writing on the backs of receipts and bills) and including footnotes for digressions. Bina is especially concerned with warning readers not to end up as she did after helping a man--the bullying Eddie--who ruined her life the day he landed in a ditch on her property after a motorcycle accident. She tells of her unwitting role as a kind of counterculture icon to a group of young radicals she calls "the Crusties" after being jailed for hitting an airplane with a hammer during a protest. (She was thinking of Eddie.) And she speaks of her secret work with a dying-with-dignity group and the adjacent grief it brings into her life, especially when a much-loved friend is involved. But the plot, emerging in fits and starts, is really beside the point: Schofield pulls off such a virtuosic feat of voice that Bina's utterances, by turns aphoristic and rambling, grief-soaked and mordantly funny, haul the reader through the book, as immersive as being trapped inside her rural kitchen with the kettle on. A masterwork that should cement Bina (and Schofield) as one of the great voices in recent fiction.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.