The Lesser Bohemians
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
A story of first love and redemption, from the author of the multi-award-winning A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing.
An eighteen-year-old girl, recently arrived in London from Ireland, is enrolled in drama school. Innocent, nervous, the youngest in her class, she is eager to make an impression, to do well. She meets a man—older, a well-regarded actor in his own right—and falls for him. But he’s haunted by more than a few demons—and their tumultuous relationship might be the undoing of them both.
Set across the bedsits and squats of mid-nineties north London, The Lesser Bohemians is a story of love and innocence, joy and discovery, the grip of the past and the struggle to be new again.
Eimear McBride was born in Liverpool but moved to Ireland when she was three. She grew up in Tubbercurry, Co. Sligo and Castlebar, Co. Mayo, before moving to London aged seventeen to study at The Drama Centre. Her first novel, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, won many literary awards including the 2014 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and the 2014 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Her most recent book is The Lesser Bohemians. Eimear lives in Norwich with her family.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McBride's second novel is more ambitious than her acclaimed debut, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, and it retains the uncompromisingly Joycean brogue and diary-like intimations of adolescence that made that first novel such a success. Set between 1994 and 1995, it follows 18-year-old Eily, a boozy ing nue, as she leaves her native Ireland to attend drama school in London. There, caught in whirl of excess and the shadow of IRA terrorism, she is mostly assigned stereotypically Irish bit parts, but finds herself captivated by a much older actor named Stephen, an ex-junkie estranged from his family and young daughter. Initially meeting without names, they embark on a tempestuous relationship that reveals the worst in both while offering Stephen a chance at redemption and Eily a future. But the real focus is McBride's stream-of-consciousness prose, in which drinking is rendered as "pints turning telescope," "the lightless hall sings sanctuary from the frenzy" of a violent encounter, and a night of youthful debauchery leaves the revelers with "Satan under every skin. Skinful under all our skin." The story (especially when Stephen's backstory hijacks the narrative) isn't full enough to sustain McBride's style, which comes to seem less and less an accurate shorthand for first love. Still, this sophomore effort is striking enough to continue McBride's forging of a daring career.
