ABSTRACT
Emma Donoghue's Room and Marian Keyes' The Brightest Star in the Sky represent two bestselling works of fiction in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. Published in the height of the recession, Donoghue's Room and Keyes' Brightest Star provide insight into the immediate aftermath of the bailout, the early years of austerity, and its effects on a society still absorbing the shock of the downturn. In depicting past events, Keyes is commenting on wider social issues, across generations, in addition to the contemporary post-Celtic Tiger period. In Brightest Star, Keyes compellingly illustrates the violence of political austerity and neoliberal discourses on the body and demonstrates, in the imaginary realm, the potential for emotion to inspire alternative models of subjectivity and a more just society. Donoghue and Keyes recall such bio-political control of non-normative bodies in their works, which illustrate how the system of political austerity that suggests that inequality is acceptable in recession times exerts violence on the State's most vulnerable residents.
