Excerpt from The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

part one

1.

The air is mild for October. Nothing shivers. Nothing smokes. A gentle westerly whistles at the panes of the lab windows like an unwelcome uncle, determined to raise the hairs on some young neck. Twenty necks bend to observe the experiment: a Perspex prism known as the "squeeze‑box"—the size of a narrow aquarium—is filled with thin layers of colored sand. The ends of the box are movable, so that its contents can be compressed to demonstrate the effects of tectonic convergence.

Thrusts. Faults. Folds. Belts. Excuse me. Olwen presses a fist to her mouth to stifle a burp, and a few students snicker. Lo and behold: geologic processes for the puny human attention span.

There is something very bodily about Olwen Flattery that the undergraduates find wildly amusing. Moments earlier, she'd used a shard of slate to scratch her inner elbow psoriasis, and a puff of dead skin particles danced visibly in the ventilation. She placed the shard back in its tray and, with her chalky fingers, lifted out a teeny‑tiny sanitized kidney stone for the undergraduates' scrutiny. Moving this kidney stone involved a person's hospitalization, she tells them. Just imagine the force it would take to move a mountain! And we're not talking about violent, sudden processes, like an earthquake shouldering up a mountain range. No. These forces are so incremental and immense, so imperceivable and unstoppable, that there's no halting their progress. They're underway right now, as we stand here, on the shifting foundations of this institute.

The students scan their pals for clues as to how to feel. They have learned to take what levity they can from these light and flaky moments, as Olwen's lectures so far have been something of a shock wave. We're a wreck, she says. Ireland is one big crash site, where the ancient continents Laurentia and Gondwana collided like two humungous cruise liners ... long before the nouveau riche were evolved to populate them. The wreckage cuts stupendously across this island, from Dingle in the west to Clogherhead in the east. The island was underwater back then, so that story didn't make itself known for mil‑ lions of years. And here we stand, sifting through the evidence of that collision in our desk organizers, all of us above sea level ... for another decade or two, anyways.

Several students begin to agitate in the pause that follows. It's hard to read the undergraduates—to know what's getting through, what with the scarves cobra'd around their mouths and their minimal eye contact. They all seem hungover, or stoned, or just returned from a silent monastery meditation retreat in Bali they spent their loans on. But they also seem deeply unnerved, and it's not paranoia.

How information is delivered seems to be more consequential than the information itself, Olwen thinks. She is losing her strength to hand it over gently. But a teacherly muscle memory prompts her now—having pushed—to pull:

Have any of ye seen it?

She makes eye contact with each student in turn, in case—as first‑ years—they need drawing out. Shawna, an exchange student with the gall of a parking enforcement officer, asks:

Is it here in Galway? Because car rental in this country is a joke. It's not in the immediate vicinity, Shawna, but—

I saw the Rock of Gibraltar, Eric offers out of nowhere—a very tall student, with asteroidal confidence.

Olwen hears the clock on the wall tick forward a cluster of seconds all in one go, like heart palpitations: harmless, but horrible. If you tell me you flew down to see the Rock of Gibraltar, Eric, when you haven't taken a bus to Dingle to ogle our own monumental bodies of rock ...

In the pause that follows, Eric takes a seat and runs his fingers through his gelled hair, leaving striations that seem almost infrastructural, as if water might collect in them. Olwen is grateful when Fionnuala—not technically a mature student, but she has a lot of cop‑on—cuts in with something likely to be relevant:

Excerpted from The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes. Copyright © 2024 by Caoilinn Hughes. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.