At Home and Abroad

Claire Gleeson is a writer from Dublin, Ireland, with short stories published by The Stinging Fly, The Ogham Stone, Lunate Fiction, JMWW and Storgy. She won the 2021 Morning Coffee Writing Competition and was runner-up in the Highlands & Islands Short Story Competition in the same year; her stories have been shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Prize, the Anthology Magazine Short Story Competition and the Benedict Kiely Short Story Competition among others.​ ​In 2021 she was awarded a Words Ireland literary mentorship.​ Her debut novel, SHOW ME WHERE IT HURTS, was a runner-up in the Irish Writers’ Centre Novel Fair 2023, and was published by Sceptre in April 2025.​ Rachel lives with her husband Tom and their two children: it's the ordinary family life she always thought she'd have. All of that changes in an instant - when Tom runs the family car off the road, seeking to end his own life, and take his wife and children with him. Rachel is left to pore over the wreckage to try and understand what happened - to find a way to go on living afterwards. What emerges is a snapshot of what it's like to live alongside someone who is suffering, how you keep yourself afloat when the person you love is drowning, and how you survive irreparable loss. Impossible to turn away from, Show Me Where It Hurts is a compelling, heartbreaking and ultimately life-affirming story of recovery and unexpected hope.