"Sinead Hynes is a tough, driven, funny, young property developer with a terrifying secret. No-one knows it: not her fellow patients in a failing hospital, and certainly not her family. She has confided only in Google and a shiny magpie. But she can't go on like this, tirelessly trying to outstrip her past and in mortal fear of her future. Across the ward, Margaret Rose is running her chaotic family from her rose-gold Nokia. In the neighbouring bed, Jane, rarely but piercingly lucid, is searching for a decent bra and for someone to listen. And Sinead needs them both. As You Were is about intimate histories, institutional failures, the kindness of strangers, and the darkly present past of modern Ireland; about women's stories and women's struggles; about seizing the moment to be free. Wildly funny, desperately tragic, inventive, and irrepressible, As You Were introduces a brilliant voice in Irish fiction with a book that is absolutely of our times. As You Were chronicles the interior life of a middle-aged woman as she tries to navigate the frenetic pace of 21st-century communication and relationships--not least of all her relationship with herself. Fiercely, funnily feminist, it uses the medical narrative and hospital setting to bear witness to the structural misogyny of the Irish state."-- Provided by publisher