I am reeling, almost whiplashed from the end of her book The Alternatives when Caoilinn Hughes’ smiling face appears on Zoom from her home in the Netherlands. The Irish writer gently reminds me, as she has had to do with other upset readers, that the cat that gets run over is a fictional cat. “I love animals and that is why I don’t eat them.”

But to the beginning. The first line she wrote for the book was an amusing and unnerving thought that had arrived unbidden. “A gentle westerly whistles at the panes of the lab window like an unwelcome uncle, determined to raise the hairs on some young neck.”

It would set the tone for the book. “That line contains everything of Olwen’s sensibility,” she says.

Olwen Flattery is an academic, high-functioning alcoholic, acerbic and sharp as she leads her Galway undergraduates on an impulsive geological field trip. The alarming al-fresco lecture on geological doom is conducted on boulders that were once glaciers and home to woolly mammoths. “We’re nearly at the closing credits” she tells them. “Processes that should take millions of years are playing out over centuries. Decades.”

After an afternoon of “pointless meetings” and dinner with her partner, in the early hours of the morning, disillusioned and knocking back gin, she gets on her bicycle, rides away from it all, keeps going across counties and disappears.

Olwen is the oldest of four brilliant damaged sisters, left to their own devices in their teens after their rackety parents were blown off a cliff in a gale. Nell, the youngest and most vulnerable, is an adjunct philosophy professor, flitting between Connecticut colleges, who has lost all feeling in her feet but is unable to afford medical insurance or treatment.

Maeve is an Instagram celebrity chef who lives on a houseboat and is having ideological differences with her book publisher. Rhona, a political scientist and public intellectual is tough, “thorny” and cushioned by material comfort. (She deliberately ran over the cat which was sitting on the road. “She was making the decision to protect the people in the car,” Hughes defends her.)

When the sisters track down Olwen living almost off-grid in remote County Leitrim, the novel changes tempo and moves into a second-act play. Along with the dazzling wit there is an undercurrent of sadness in these women as they clash and regroup, try to untangle the past and find the way forward.

Hughes is one of five children. “Siblings can be bonded by shared experiences but also trapped by them,” she says. “I love those latent questions around how siblings negotiate those really, really charged relationships, how they bridge chasms in their belief systems or utterly fail to.”

Hughes says she writes just the one draft “slowly”. “I edit as I go so that by the time I get to the final sentence the book is complete.” There is no plan or outline. “I write completely into the dark, without knowing the shape of a book or what will happen.” It is a process, she says, of discovery. “If I knew where I was going I don’t know why I would want to go there.”

The book itself, she says, “is wiser, more eloquent, braver and deeper than I am”. Her job is “trying not to do wrong by it, trying not to manipulate it”. “If I ever have writers’ block it is usually because I’ve done something funny or convenient or cute and just somehow dishonest. I usually have to unpick the sentences until I get to that moment and then I can carry on again.”

It’s a high-wire act with no safety net. “You can be two years into a book and discover that it is not a novel, it’s just not catching, maybe it was a short story.”

By the last quarter of writing a book, it is electric, and everything in it feels real to her. “Everything is giving you energy. It is demanding to be written, all you need to do is sit there.” She was at this point with The Alternatives when she was badly injured after being hit by a truck on a motorway in Spain. “I remember being enormously grateful that I was at that point. Even if I was 10 per cent less far through the novel I would have lost it. On all of those painkillers I don’t think I could have done the work that happens in the middle part of a book, so full of doubt and so, so difficult. I feel really lucky that I got to finish it.”

The Alternatives is a contemporary novel. Her characters are addressing current philosophical and existential questions. But Hughes says she was not reading the great texts for research. “I am an excellent procrastinator, so I tend not to feed that beast. I try to do as little research as possible. I certainly leaned into areas that I was already interested in and gave the women careers that I could imagine having if I had eight or nine lives.”

At her convent school where she did “terribly”, Hughes once got an impressive zero in geography. Though as a vegetarian and “impatient cook” she did consult a chef friend “to make sure Maeve wasn’t going to poison anyone”. “I ended up having to change the starters.”

The Alternatives was shaped by being written in the ancient landscape on the west coast of Ireland. “There’s so much geology to the fore. You can see the granite shouldering up through the fields. There’s no trees there, it’s very wind stripped. So much weather lands there that it washes away so much of the superficial geology,” she says. “You can see the rock and the ancient story of how the land came to be.” Unlike Nell with her poor numb feet, Hughes is not voluntarily a cold-water swimmer, “except that if you ever swim in Ireland you’re automatically a cold-water swimmer”. “There’s no such thing as summer swimming there.”

She was living in New Zealand when she wrote her first book The Wasp and the Orchid. She went to Auckland to run a marathon in 2007 and kept on running, sort of accidentally staying for seven years – most of her 20s.

“It was a very long marathon,” she quips. “I got sucked because I am quite outdoorsy and the fact that New Zealand doesn’t have any big predatory animals meant that you can go running as a woman on your own. There was a certain type of liberation I felt about the landscape there.”

Like her prodigiously academic fictional characters she would gain her own PhD in English literature from Victoria University in Wellington. “My associations with Australia and New Zealand are always with sea – sea adjacency. There’s a parallel there with Irish writing. I think when you are on an island that does factor in, in a very big way.”

Hughes’ novels and short stories have been shortlisted and won an impressive number of awards. Her second novel Wild Laughter won the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award in 2021.

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She “viscerally remembers” the call telling her she had won. “I think I was crying for days afterwards with a sense of relief because the book had come out during COVID and I’d not met any readers and wasn’t in bookshops. It just felt like what was the point of publishing it?”

Winning enabled her to keep going. “I actually need that sort of critical success for the publisher to want to keep publishing me,” she says. “It really matters. Without prize recognition I am not sure I would keep being published.”

The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes (Bloomsbury) is out now.

Caoilinn Hughes will be appearing at Readings Bookshop Melbourne on August 5, Roaring Stories bookshop Sydney August 6 and at the Byron Writers Festival, Byron Bay, August 9-11.byronwritersfestival.com

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