Elaine Feeney’s debut novel, As You Were (2020), followed a woman with terminal cancer whose fellow female patients, on the ward they shared, were reckoning with the shadows of shame and punishment cast by the Catholic Church. It was a masterwork of polyphonic narrative voice: like something Beckett might have written, had he confronted the legacy of Ireland’s Mother and Baby homes.  How To Build a Boat, Feeney’s Booker-longlisted second, also foregrounds voice, primarily the perspective of Jamie, a neurodiverse teenager embarking on his first year at the Oratory, an oppressively upstanding school for boys. Jamie likes Edgar Allen Poe, and the colour red, and the dynamical systems discovered by the Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, which argue for the existence of universal patterns of connectivity.…