My grateful thanks to Maddie at Luath Press for offering me a copy of Daughterhood by Alison Irvine and to Gavin for ensuring I received it. I’m delighted to share my review of Daughterhood today.
Published by Luath on 30th September 2026, Daughterhood is available for purchase through the publisher links here.
Daughterhood
Now, aged 46, with the menopause pestering her like a clanking door in a gale, she wasn’t sure how to proceed.
Nina Polmont’s life is changing.
The on-off ex is gone, her sister is back from New Zealand and her step-daughter has come home. At the same time her parents’ marriage is falling apart, her niece has estranged herself and the music teacher who broke her heart thirty years ago suddenly wants to see her. Add hormones. Add night sweats. Add desire. And add the sinking feeling that she has made a catastrophic mess of her life. Is it ever too late to start again?
As past desires clash with new obligations and a midlife surge of rebellion and regret takes over, Nina tries to work out who has betrayed her more – her sister or her own heart.
My Review of Daughterhood
Nina feels her life is in disarray.
I thought Daughterhood was a wonderful book. I didn’t especially like Nina and I thought her sister Kate was truly awful much of the time, but my goodness Alison Irvine hooked me into their lives and showed me their personalities in their rawest state so that I couldn’t tear myself away. Daughterhood is a superb insight into how real women feel as they age, reflect and, frequently, regret.
In many ways, the plot is relatively prosaic, and therein lies its strength. Alison Irvine explores familial relationships, duty, jealousy and all the permutations of real life with such dexterity that the narrative is utterly mesmerising. Her prose works brilliantly because often the most important effects are created by the simplest of sentences and her direct speech is so skilled that, not only did I feel like I was eavesdropping conversations, I felt the sucker punch of emotion the characters were feeling too.
What is so affecting in Daughterhood is the complete understanding that love and hate are frequently two sides of the same coin. We can despise someone even as we love them. The dynamic between Nina and Kate in particular crackles with tension, passion and an unrecognised understanding of one another that borders the obsessive. I loved the depiction of marriage exemplified through Reenie and Russ too and the way Nina and Kate’s relationship with their parents has been inverted as so many of us find as we mature.
The more Daughterhood progressed, the more my heart ached for Nina. Her wasted years, her imperfect acknowledgement of herself, and her grief made me wish I could have climbed into the book to provide the kind of solace she attempts to give to others. Nina is a flawed, brittle, human, and utterly believable woman in the middle with recalcitrant parents and demanding youngsters, none of whom fully comprehend what Nina has endured. Not even Nina herself really understands what she wants.
Intelligent, intense and intimate, Daughterhood is the book for every woman entering the middle phase of her life, regardless of her circumstances. And those outside those parameters would find it enlightening, educational and engaging too! Daughterhood is real life, beautifully written and exposed on the page. I loved it.
About Alison Irvine
Alison Irvine was born in London to antipodean parents. She was brought up in London and Essex and moved to Glasgow in 2005 to study an MLitt in Creative Writing at Glasgow University. She graduated with distinction in 2006 and since then her writing has been published in The Celtic View and in an anthology of Glasgow writing, Outside of a Dog. In 2007 she was awarded a Scottish Arts Council New Writer’s Bursary to support the writing of her novel about emigration from Glasgow to the Antipodes. Alison works as an actress and drama workshop facilitator. She lives in Glasgow.
For further information, visit Alison’s website and find her on Bluesky, Facebook and Instagram.
