Oisín McKenna’s debut novel, Evenings and Weekends, is set across a blisteringly hot weekend in 2019. It follows a cast of characters – couple Ed and Maggie who are moving back home to Basildon after finding out Maggie is pregnant, Maggie’s best friend Phil who is exploring an open relationship and has a complicated past with Ed, Phil’s mom Rosaleen whose been diagnosed with cancer and a beached whale.

Both a literary soap opera and a state of the nation novel, Evenings and Weekends takes a sharp look at the housing crisis, low wage jobs and the precarity of people trying to survive and living for the weekend.