The Wardrobe Department

De: Elaine Garvey

Narrado por: Denise Gough

Mairéad works all hours in a run-down West End theatre’s wardrobe department, her whole existence made up of threads and needles, running errands to mend shoes, fixing broken zips and handwashing underwear. She must also do her best to avoid groping hands backstage and the terrible bullying of the show’s producer.

But, despite her skill and growing experience, half of Mairéad remains in her windy, hedge-filled home in Ireland, and the life she abandoned there. In noughties London, she has the potential to be somebody completely new – why, then, does she feel so stuck? Between the bustling side streets of Soho, and the wet grass of Leitrim and Donegal, Mairéad is caught, running from the girl she was but unable to reveal the woman she’d hoped to become.

Told with rare honesty and equal measures of warmth and bite, The Wardrobe Department is a story about reckoning with the past, finding the courage to change the present – and asking what comes next.

©2025 Elaine Garvey (P)2025 Canongate Books Ltd

Reseñas de la Crítica

'Elaine Garvey is a tremendous new talent in Irish writing - I'm certain the reader will recognise inside half a page that she's the real thing' (KEVIN BARRY)

'The Wardrobe Department is at once familiar and surprising, knotty and tender, tough and beguiling, and its author a sure hand with a light touch . . . Garvey [is] one of those enviable writers whose piercing eye for human contradiction and self-sabotage never dims her affection for the souls she's so beautifully painted' (LISA McINERNEY)

'The Wardrobe Department is full of verve and wit and humanity. In writing that is sharp and sassy, Garvey captures perfectly the complexities and heartbreak of a young woman's life and the great pull and push of home' (MARY COSTELLO)

'The Wardrobe Department is so beautiful. London theatre and rural Ireland . . . Elaine Garvey has created two exquisitely drawn worlds that I know so well and brought them to life through the eyes of a young woman who could be my best friend. I love this book. Will read it again and again and again' (DENISE GOUGH)

'A gift of a novel. I felt relieved after reading it, like I had been hungry for some elusive feeling, and finally found something that hit the spot. There are sentences in this book that will keep me going for a long time' (LOUISE NEALON)

My review of the wardrobe department

Elaine Garvey has written a book about a young woman, Mairead, making her way in a world where she is learning to value herself in spite of how she is devalued. The theatre where she works and a family funeral are well-described. The narrator in the audible version infuses the protagonist's voice with struggle. This is a good book and I recommend it.