Book review: Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan by Ruth Gilligan

Ruth Gilligan wrote her first novel as a project in transition year. A school-based romance, it made number one in the Irish bestsellers charts, making Ruth, 18 at the time of publication, the youngest person to have achieved this.

I interviewed her at the time, and found her to be supremely confident, and ambitious. (Also an actress, she had a teenage part on Fair City.)

Ruth followed her debut with two, less successful books, both written by the time she had left Cambridge University, and since then, she has been honing her craft, dabbling in journalism, and taking an MFA in Creative Writing, a subject she now teaches at Birmingham University. And it’s clear the writer is keen to shrug off her early, juvenile efforts.