Ordinary Human Failings
Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024
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4.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
*LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2024*
*SHORTLISTED FOR FICTION – 2023 NERO BOOK AWARDS*
After the death of a young girl, the finger of suspicion is pointing at one reclusive family…
‘Ambitious and original’ DAVID NICHOLLS
‘Gripping… A triumph’ SUNDAY TIMES
It’s 1990 in London and, after the death of a young girl on an estate, the finger of suspicion is pointing at one reclusive Irish family: the Greens.
At their heart sits Carmel: beautiful, other-worldly, and once destined for a future beyond her circumstances until life – and love – got in her way. Now, as the scandal unfolds and the tabloids hunt their monster, she must confront the secrets and silences that have trapped her family for so many generations.
A DAILY TELEGRAPH, TIMES, NEW STATESMAN AND SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR
‘Daring, brilliant… Bold and beautiful’ DAILY TELEGRAPH
‘A compulsive read’ THE TIMES
‘Heartbreaking’ VOGUE
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Irish author Nolan (Acts of Desperation) delivers an insightful if lugubrious tale of a family under suspicion for a neighbor girl's murder. Carmel Green, a young unwed Irish mother in 1990 England, once believed she was "destined for special things." Now, feeling painfully ordinary, she mourns her faded promise. Carmel and her 10-year-old daughter, Lucy, live with Carmel's father and brother, both of whom are alcoholics. Her mother, an affable woman who held the family together, died two years ago. Nolan alternates perspectives between the four Greens and Tom, an ambitious newspaper reporter who becomes interested in the family when their three-year-old neighbor is strangled to death, and suspicion falls on Lucy. After the police take Lucy into custody, Tom sequesters Carmel and the men in a small hotel, where he plies them with alcohol in hopes of getting enough material to write a "major, state-of-the-nation piece" on the family of a child murderess. The Greens' revelations are by turn ironic and sad. Though the gloomy subject matter makes for rough going, Nolan is a gifted writer, capable of stunningly precise observations. This unflinching tale provokes.
