"There's nobody else here"

This article examines Conor O'Callaghan's debut novel Nothing on Earth (2016), which tells the story of a family of returned Irish migrants after the financial crisis of 2008.Lacking any viable social network, they move into a show house in a newly-built estate where they experience both geographical isolation as well as psychological stress through eerie noises and, later, the unexplained disappearance of one family member after the other.The setting of the novel, a so-called ghost estate, can be read not only as a reminder of the crash but also as a space in which feelings of rootlessness and placelessness prevail, and the desire for belonging and community remains unmet.The novel shows how both traditional and alternative models of community fail on every level -the local level of the home, the village, and the family proves to be as flawed as the transnational or the virtual level.Ultimately, even the communal unit of the family dissolves, its members quite literally vanishing.The communicative processes Gerard Delanty sees as the basis of every form of community are thwarted either by language or technological barriers or by the lack of communal spaces to encounter other people.Feelings of community are no longer upheld by shared religious beliefs, and the representatives of the Catholic Church are no longer able to work as integrating forces.Overall, the novel paints a bleak picture of recessionary Ireland and illustrates the broken promises of the Celtic Tiger boom, a period in which Ireland became one of the world's most globalised countries.