Caroline O'Donoghue: 'I'm obsessed by the idea of youth and experience'
For her new YA novel, Skipshock, Caroline O’Donoghue reimagined the nature of time, writes Susan Mansfield
The pliability of time is a device much enjoyed by writers of fantasy and magic realism. The trick is to do more than travel through it in a Tardis, and Skipshock, Caroline O’Donoghue’s new novel for young adults, plays with time in a way which feels fresh and edgy.
When 16-year-old Margo finds herself in a parallel universe, she discovers that time is a commodity. In the impoverished north of the world in which she has landed, a day lasts just a few hours and lives are correspondingly short. The reverse is true in the wealthy south, which oppresses the north economically and politically. Travel between areas is all but forbidden. Time is money. Time is power.
She says it’s the most difficult book she’s ever written, and perhaps also her best. “People think writing YA fiction is commercial and fun and breezy, that the contemporary literary stuff is the hard-thinking work,” she says. “I do both and I’ve found more and more that the reverse is true. When you’re trying to measure how time is passing in several different universes… I had to buy a big manual calculator!”
Margo is on a train from Cork to Dublin when she slips between worlds and meets Moon, a young travelling salesman. His job gives him a rare permit to travel, but at a cost. Crossing temporal boundaries takes a toll on the body – the “skipshock” of the title – think jet-lag with bells on. The effects are cumulative. Salesmen die young.
O’Donoghue says that the character of Moon had been in her head for years: “Sometimes you write books because you think they will make you money, and sometimes you write a book because you have to get it out of your head so it will stop bothering you,” she laughs. “This is definitely one of those.”
It was sparked, partly, by Brexit, which made O’Donoghue – the holder of an Irish passport in London – the envy of her friends. “It struck me that we were this group of mainly white, very privileged people, but we were having this discussion that people all over the world have all the time, which is: I have the wrong piece of paper for where I’m supposed to travel to and how I’m supposed to live. I believe some of the best fantasy and sci-fi comes from moments of surreal lived experience where it just feels like ‘This can’t be right’.”
Then came the pandemic, which added its own perspective to the idea of travel prohibition, and the strangeness of the passing of time. “And now we’re in 2025 we all say we don’t want to read or hear about that time. I think we don’t want to talk about it because of the time which was stolen from us.
“I arrived at the idea of skipshock because of that time anxiety. Part of me was thinking: we need a way to talk about the existential loss of time which isn’t a Covid memoir. We need a fantastical, romantic, dreamy, adventurous way of talking about what is still a big thing for people.”
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O’Donoghue arrived in London from Cork when she was 21 with an English degree, a handful of newspaper clippings and an unstoppable drive to become a writer. Taking any writing work she could get, she eventually secured a job as a journalist at the now defunct feminist website The Pond. That helped her get an agent and her first novel, Promising Young Women, was published when she was 28.
After two novels about millennials in London, she wrote All Our Hidden Gifts, a YA novel which struck gold on both sides of the Atlantic and became a New York Times bestseller. Two sequels followed. At 35, she has published seven books and hosts the podcast Sentimental Garbage, which has had 11.5 million downloads worldwide. She is currently adapting her 2023 literary novel, The Rachel Incident, for Channel 4.
But writing YA fiction has been one of the surprises of her career. “It’s the place where I do my deep thinking about what I think about the world. I thought All Our Hidden Gifts was my money series! It started as this fairly commercial idea for a series of tarot card-infused mysteries for teenagers.
“Then, because I had so many colours in my paint box – magic and sci-fi and ghosts and the past and the future – I ended up writing about things I never thought I’d write about like religious trauma and the politics of belief, and what it feels like when a Leftist community starts going Right. Those books actually ended up being the most cerebral work of my career.”
At least until Skipshock, the first of two novels about Margo and Moon, which is arguably both more complex and more political. For this book, she had to build a world with customs and belief systems, economics and class, races and ethnic minorities: a world which turned out to have something to say about the world we live in.
“It’s funny, because I’m not the kind of person who talks about politics at parties. But I think when you’re writing YA you can’t really get away from thinking ‘What do I need to tell these young people?’ And the thing I kept coming back to is that over the course of your life, you will be asked to hate people who have less than you. It will happen in a systematic way which diminishes their humanity, and I need you to look at the ways that hatred is seeded and watered, in language, in laws, all of that.”
While she’s happy to divert her ideas down two different paths, YA flights of fantasy and contemporary novels about relationships for adults, she says that so far all her protagonists have been under 25. “I really am obsessed by the idea of youth and experience. Everybody has a moment when experience will oxidise their youth and they will become a person of experience. Their innocence is chipped away. I find that fascinating.”
Having published novel number seven, she says she has been able to take stock. “For so long the sentence that defined my life was ‘I’m trying to be a writer’ and the word that was underlined was ‘trying’
“As I get older, the sentence is still ‘I’m trying to be a writer’, but I want to underline the word ‘writer’ more than ‘trying’. It’s about maybe writing less but writing better. Doing the best by your craft, rather than doing the best by your career.”
Skipshock by Caroline O’Donoghue is published by Walker Books, £16.99. Caroline O’Donoghue is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival as part of the YA programme on 17 August at 12noon, and presents a live episode of Sentimental Garbage in the adult programme on 16 August at 3pm.
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