Sara Baume Opening Night review and information of the content of the new novel by the Irish writer. Granta Books will publish the Sara Baume novel, on February 12, 2026. Here you can read information about the content of the book, the author and the publication.
Sara Baume Opening Night reviews
Whenever a review of Opening Night the new novel of Sara Baume, the Irish writer, appears in the media, we’ll highlight it on this page.
Opening Night
- Author: Sara Baume (Ireland)
- Book type: Irish novel
- Publisher: Granta Books
- To be released: Febryary 12, 2026
- Length: 224 pages
- Format: hardback / paperback / ebook / audiobook
- Prize: £ 16.99
- Order book from: Amazon / Bol
Blurb of the new Sara Baume novel
I met Mollie’s paintings before I met Mollie.
Shortly after the imposed isolation of the pandemic, Sara Baume came across a painting at a pop-up exhibition in a renovated shed in rural West Cork. It so intrigued her that she was inspired to make contact with the artist. Mollie Douthit, a North Dakotan exile, was living and working alone in a log cabin down a ravaged laneway surrounded by rugged coastline. Sara and Mollie discovered they had much in common – a dysfunctional attitude towards companionship, a devotion to the daily rituals of their respective art practices, an affinity with nature. They started to meet every month for soup and punishing swims in the Atlantic.
Sara fell under the spell of Mollie’s paintings, pictures that welded memory and reality, and gradually started to write about them, curious as to whether any particular insight might be provided by the intimacy of friendship with the artist, and whether it might be possible to craft a book in the style of the paintings. But what she had not anticipated was that a settled period in her own life would coincide with a period of tumultuous change for Mollie, and soon she found herself squabbling with more complex ideas, about community and nationality, about neurosis and mysticism, about love and pain and the power of art.
