We spend the first half trying to be someone, the second realizing we always were.
In her third novel, Irish writer Sarah Gilmartin turns her careful attention to the friendships and marriages we carry from youth into middle age, asking what it costs us to remain loyal — to others, to our parents, and to the versions of ourselves we once believed in. Set across a single year in contemporary Dublin, Little Vanities gathers four interconnected characters around the quiet devastation of lives that have drifted from their own intentions. Drawing on Pinter and Roth as moral lodestars, Gilmartin suggests that betrayal, for all its damage, may sometimes be the only honest door left open.
- Four Dublin friends — a faded rugby player, an actor, a physiotherapist, and a working-class wife who has always felt like an outsider — are each quietly unravelling beneath the surface of ordinary adult life.
- An Abbey Theatre production of Pinter's Betrayal casts a long, ironic shadow over the group, as the play's central premise — a man sleeping with his best friend's wife — begins to mirror the novel's own gathering tensions.
- Gilmartin refuses to let infidelity carry all the weight, pressing instead into the subtler treacheries: the self-betrayals of clinging to false identities, the slow drift from friends who knew us before we changed.
- The novel's architecture — five monthly sections interwoven with four intimate interior portraits — creates a compulsive, layered momentum that pulls the reader through time and consciousness with quiet force.
- Rather than ending in ruin, the novel arrives at a hard-won hopefulness, proposing that destruction can clear ground, and that the second half of life may finally allow us to become who we always were.
Sarah Gilmartin's third novel announces its intentions immediately — an epigraph from Philip Roth, and then, on the very first page, the full inventory of adult disappointment: lies, jealousy, resentment, sex both wanted and unwanted. This is a book about the small, necessary cruelties of growing up, and it does not look away.
The cast is recognisably Dublin: Dylan, a former rugby player from Sallins now adrift after his playing days ended and struggling with Long Covid; Ben, an actor and childhood friend who has just landed a role in a Pinter play at the Abbey; Stevie, a physiotherapist from Killiney who arrived at Trinity and never quite left their orbit; and Rachel, Dylan's wife, a working-class woman who has always felt admitted to this world on sufferance. None of them are content. Rachel keeps the household running while trying to conceive again. Stevie turns over the question of whether she wants children at all. Ben's new role — in Pinter's Betrayal, a play about a man sleeping with his best friend's wife — hangs over the group with an irony Gilmartin deploys knowingly.
The novel's structure is one of its quiet achievements. Moving through a single year in five monthly sections, then folding in four chapters devoted entirely to individual interior lives, Gilmartin passes the narrative between consciousnesses with a fluidity that feels effortless but must have demanded enormous discipline. The effect is compulsive — the kind of book that swallows hours whole.
What distinguishes Little Vanities is its refusal to let the loudest betrayal — infidelity — crowd out the subtler ones. Gilmartin is equally interested in how we betray our parents by becoming ourselves, how we betray our friends by changing, and how we betray ourselves by clinging to who we once were. She moves between these registers with a steady hand, grounding them in the kind of precise social observation — an Irish festival rendered in a single sweaty, Chumbawamba-bellowing line — that accumulates into something that feels like truth.
The ending resists both sentimentality and despair. Betrayal, Gilmartin suggests, is not only corrosive — sometimes it clears the ground. Sometimes it is the only way out of a life that has grown too small and too false. It is a near-flawless novel from a writer who deepens her craft with every book.
Sarah Gilmartin's third novel opens with an epigraph from Philip Roth—"The old, old story – deceived by life"—and from there, the book does not look away. Friendship, lies, resentment, jealousy, betrayal, sex both wanted and unwanted: all of it arrives on the first page, and the reader understands immediately that this is a book about the small, necessary cruelties of growing up.
Gilmartin, who was born in Limerick, has spent her three novels studying the fault lines in human relationships. Her debut in 2021 examined family dynamics around a dinner table. Her second, two years later, turned its attention to gender and power. Now, in Little Vanities, she trains her eye on friendship and marriage—the bonds we forge in youth and the weight they carry into middle age. The cast is Dublin through and through: Dylan, a former rugby player who grew up in Sallins; Ben, an actor who grew up alongside him; Stevie, a physiotherapist from Killiney who arrived at Trinity College and stayed in their orbit; and Rachel, Dylan's wife, a working-class woman who has always felt like she was let in on sufferance.
When the novel begins, none of them are particularly content. Dylan is adrift after his playing days ended, struggling with Long Covid, uncertain what comes next when your body and your credentials no longer match. Rachel keeps the household running while trying to conceive again, doing the work that goes unnoticed. Stevie, competent and steady in her profession, is turning over the question of whether she wants children at all. Ben has finally caught a break—a role in an Abbey Theatre production of Harold Pinter's Betrayal, a play about a man sleeping with his best friend's wife. The irony is not subtle, and Gilmartin knows it. She plants both Roth and Pinter as the twin pillars of her story and lets the reader settle in for something uncomfortable.
The structure of the novel is its own kind of architecture. Gilmartin moves through a single year in five monthly sections, then intersperses four additional parts that belong entirely to individual characters' interior lives. Each section folds backward and forward in time, passing the narrative baton from one consciousness to another with a fluidity that feels effortless on the page but must have required tremendous discipline to execute. The effect is compulsive—the kind of book where you promise yourself one more chapter and suddenly three hours have vanished.
What makes the novel sing is Gilmartin's capacity for bleak, precise observation. She describes Dylan trying to summon the memory of his wife as she was when they first met, only to find that image has been entirely overwritten by the present version of her. She captures an Irish music festival with a single line: the sweaty crowd, the drunk stranger in a Roscommon jersey bellowing Chumbawamba lyrics. These details accumulate into something that feels like truth.
The novel's real sophistication lies in how it handles betrayal itself. There is the obvious kind—infidelity, the thing that Pinter's play makes literal. But Gilmartin is interested in the subtler treacheries: the ways we betray our parents by becoming ourselves, the ways we betray our friends by changing, the ways we betray ourselves by clinging to false versions of who we are. She modulates between these registers with a steady hand, never letting the louder drama drown out the quieter, more corrosive ones.
And here is where the novel surprises: it does not treat betrayal as purely destructive. Sometimes destruction clears the ground. Sometimes it offers an exit from stagnation, a chance to redraw the boundaries of a life, to move toward something more honest and less suffocating. The ending is hopeful without being sentimental, grounded in the recognition that we spend the first half of our lives trying to be someone and the second half realizing we always were exactly who we are. It is a near-flawless novel from a writer who continues to deepen her craft with each book.
Notable Quotes
He tried to see that person now but could only see his wife.— Dylan, reflecting on how memory and presence have become indistinguishable
Maybe it was just the human condition to spend the first half of your life trying to be someone and the second realising you always were.— Dylan's late-novel recognition of identity and self-delusion
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
What makes Gilmartin's approach to betrayal different from the usual literary treatment of infidelity?
She's not interested in betrayal as scandal or melodrama. She uses it as a diagnostic tool—a way to see what was already broken, what people were already pretending about. The affair in the novel is almost incidental to the real betrayals happening in plain sight.
The structure sounds intricate. Did it serve the story or did it feel like a constraint?
It's the opposite of a constraint. The five months plus the character interludes create this rhythm where you're always seeing the same moment from different angles, different truths bumping against each other. It makes you realize how much we all live in our own versions of events.
Why does she use Pinter and Roth as anchors rather than just telling the story straight?
Because the characters are living inside literary narratives without knowing it. They're acting out betrayals that have been written a thousand times before. The epigraphs are like a mirror held up to show them they're not unique—which is both devastating and oddly comforting.
The novel seems skeptical of happiness. Is there any genuine contentment in it?
Not contentment, no. But there's something better at the end—a kind of clarity. The characters stop performing versions of themselves. That's not happiness exactly, but it's honest, and the novel suggests that's worth more.
How does Rachel's outsider status shape the book?
She's the one who sees most clearly because she was never fully admitted to the inner circle. She's not blinded by the mythology of their friendship. That gives her a kind of moral clarity the others have to suffer to achieve.