By Megan Thomas
I reviewed this for the most recent of nbmagazine, which is out now. I know it seems unlikely, but I’m not just saying “subscribe to the magazine” because I’m in it. It’s wonderful.
Here’s an extract from my review, followed by some further thoughts: “The plot is morbid: Mia, a very young child, is found dead in a council estate in London, and the evidence suggests it was the 10-year-old child of a family of Irish immigrants, Lucy Green. A fiendish journalist with little regard for the humans behind the scoop picks up the story, and begins a feverish attempt to sensationalise every element of the occurrence so that his readers (who he dubs ‘peasants’) are suitably satisfied by the juicy lives of other ‘peasants’. The undercurrents of the novel, however, are arguably more morbid than the plot – what led to this death?”
When I read Megan Nolan’s first novel, Acts of Desperation, I remember finding the main character distractingly unrelatable. In this second novel, the characters were arguably less relatable and yet I was completely and utterly immersed in their worlds. Nolan writes with such compassion, and with such a firm grasp of the chaotic fragility of being human, that I think you’d struggle not to suffer along with each of these flawed, damaged characters.
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