The Rachel Incident
‘If you’ve ever been young, you will love The Rachel Incident like I did’ (Gabrielle Zevin) - the international bestseller
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4.3 • 96 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
The international bestseller: a hilarious, heartfelt story of all-consuming and unexpected love
'If you've ever been young, you will love The Rachel Incident like I did' GABRIELLE ZEVIN
'Funny, nostalgic, sexy' MONICA HEISEY
'Hilarious, wise and wonderfully written' GRAHAM NORTON
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Everyone in Cork remembers the Rachel Incident. But what really happened? It's simple. It's complicated. It's about love, sex and friendship. It's definitely about betrayal. And, above all, it's the story of Rachel and James, two twenty-somethings who met at a bookshop, became best friends, and spent one unforgettable year screwing up and growing up.
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'Reading it is like hearing your funniest, sexiest friend tell you the best story they know' KATHERINE RUNDELL
'Sharply witty, warm-hearted and wise' GUARDIAN
'O'Donoghue captures all the intensity of messy young love' MAIL ON SUNDAY
'A book full of love, and it is extremely easy to love reading it' VOGUE
'Chaos at its finest' STYLIST
'Easily 13/10 . . . Funny, lovely, romantic' MARIAN KEYES
The Rachel Incident was a #2 bestseller in Ireland in June 2023
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two 20-something roommates become enmeshed with an older married couple in this smart and colorful outing from O'Donoghue (Promising Young Women). It's 2009, and James Devlin, a Christmas temp at O'Conner Books in Cork, Ireland, initially clashes with his bookseller colleague Rachel Murray due to their class differences—Rachel is from a family of cosmetic dentists and bankers while James is from rough-and-tumble Manchester—though they soon become friends and rent a cottage together. After Rachel invites her former university professor Fred Byrne to give a reading at the store, his arrival with Deenie, his wife and publisher, adds intrigue, beginning with James encouraging Rachel to seduce Fred, Rachel entering a fraught friendship with Deenie, and James processing his on-and-off relationship with an emotionally unavailable man by writing a TV script. Along the way, there's a pregnancy and a plan for an abortion. In addition to the interpersonal drama, O'Donoghue pulls no punches in her depiction of the abortion crisis in Ireland during the period, showing how women either traveled abroad or resorted to illegal and potentially dangerous methods to terminate pregnancies. Key to it all is O'Donoghue's spot-on portrayal of Rachel's youthful yearning ("I was twenty and I needed two things: to be in love and to be taken seriously"). In O'Donoghue's world, there's plenty to fall in love with.
Customer Reviews
Delightful
A touching, funny warm tale of love and lovers of all kinds.