BookBrunch: Pushkin signs Sarah Gilmartin’s ‘irresistibly clever’ third novel
Little Vanities is about ‘betrayal and desire written with incisive bite’
Pushkin Press imprint ONE has signed Little Vanities, the third novel by author and critic Sarah Gilmartin. Publishing director Laura Macaulay bought UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Sallyanne Sweeney at MMB Creative, in an exclusive submission. Little Vanities will be published on 21 May 2026.
Little Vanities is set in Dublin, and follows the decades-long friendship between two couples, from their Trinity college days to early middle life. Exploring their marriages and intertwined relationships, the novel circles around a performance of Pinter’s Betrayal, with the play’s depiction of deception, hidden emotions and veiled motivations all too present in the real world.
Gilmartin said: “I’m very happy to be published once again by the brilliant Pushkin Press and can’t wait for them to share Little Vanities with readers. It’s a story about the messy, interconnected relationships of two couples approaching 40 who can’t quite let go of their youthful desires and ambitions. An exploration of longing, as driver and destroyer, it looks at the lengths people are willing to go to in the pursuit of pleasure over pain.”
Macaulay said: “I’m in awe of what Sarah Gilmartin has achieved with Little Vanities: it’s a sexy, funny, irresistibly clever novel about betrayal and desire written with incisive bite – the characters are living with me still. Readers are going to love it.”
Gilmartin is an Irish writer and arts journalist whose short fiction has been published in The Dublin Review, New Irish Writing and The Tangerine. She won the Máirtín Crawford Short Story Award in 2020. Her bestselling debut novel Dinner Party (ONE, 2021) was shortlisted for an Irish Book Award and the Kate O’Brien Award. Her second novel Service (ONE, 2023) was a Washington Post top books of summer and included in the Irish Times list of the best Irish fiction of the 21st century (2025). She is the current Arts Council Writer-in-Residence at Dublin City University.
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