[ About Make Strange ]
It begins on an orange afternoon, cool but ruminant, close to Halloween.
Sunny, only four years old, looks up from the tub of toys in the living room and asks, ‘Mama, do you remember when I died?’
Over the strange, strained year that follows, Sunny will refer repeatedly to her previous lives – and how they ended.
Her parents Lena and Odhran, who tumbled into family life after an accidental pregnancy and a hasty registry office wedding, are left desperate for answers. Is their child suffering from disassociation, a psychological disorder or something more? Has she absorbed their own haunted histories – Lena’s experience as an indie musician in the era of sleaze, or the shady legacy of madness in Odhran’s family? Can we ever really protect our children? What if we can’t?
From the multi-award-winning author of This Happy and We Were Young, comes a shimmering, propulsive novel about maternal concern, childhood imagination, past lives and present loves.
[ My Review ]
Make Strange by Niamh Campbell published June 4th 2026 with W&N and is described as ‘a shimmering, propulsive novel about maternal concerns, childhood imagination, past lives and present loves.’
I was intrigued when picking up this book as both the cover and the premise appealed to me. Quite a peculiar read in so many ways as nothing major happens yet as a reader you feel compelled to keep turning the pages. Lena and Odhran, following an unplanned pregnancy, get married and establish a life together. Both have lived interesting and varied lives in the past so settling into the mundanity of family life has its challenges. Four years on and Lena, now parenting fulltime, has moments when she regrets her decisions and longs for the freedom the experienced pre-motherhood. She had been a musician, a singer in a band, that had had limited success and those heady days remain in her mind, throwing her back to her carefree youth.
Lena is completely thrown one autumnal day, when Sunny, now four years old, asks about a previous life she inhabited and how she had already died. Totally freaked out, Lena panics. She is convinced something is wrong with Sunny. She speaks to others who dismiss her worry as no more than childish behaviour, something Sunny will grow out of, but Lena is not convinced.
On a trip west to Odhran’s family home in Co. Clare, his mother, a retired GP, senses something with Sunny’s behaviour, leaving Lena even more at her wits end. With Odhran hoping for a move home to his native county, he attempts to silence Lena’s concerns but it seems that Lena is on her own path, one that she needs to take in order to move on with her life.
Make Strange explores the pressures of early motherhood and the psychological impact for all involved. Lena is obsessed with the fact that Sunny’s behaviour is as a result of something she has done wrong. Guilt is a familiar word to every parent. That feeling of responsibility for every action and thought of your child is real. There are some that say you are only ever as happy as your least happy child, which often-times holds very true. You experience their emotional state and would do anything to alleviate their pain or sadness. Niamh Campbell tackles this idea, probing deeper into the mindset of the parents as they navigate this challenging time.
An interesting read, Make Strange is an evocative tale, one that leaves the reader a little unsettled and, in no doubt, that Niamh Campbell is a beautiful writer.
[Thank you to Plunkett PR for a copy of Make Strange in exchange for my honest review ]
[ Bio ]
Niamh Campbell is the author of This Happy (2020) and We Were Young (2022). She has won the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.
