The Lesser Bohemians
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction
Shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, the Goldsmiths Prize, and the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards Eason Novel of the Year
Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction
A captivating, daring novel from Eimear McBride, whose astonishing debut novel, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, was an international literary phenomenon and earned the author multiple awards and recognition.
Upon arrival in London, an eighteen-year-old Irish girl begins anew as a drama student, with all the hopes of any young actress searching for the fame she's always dreamed of. She struggles to fit in—she's young and unexotic; a naive new girl—but soon she forges friendships and finds a place for herself in the big city.
Then she meets an attractive older man. He's an established actor twenty years her senior, and the inevitable, clamorous relationship that ensues is one that will change her forever.
A redemptive, captivating story of passion and innocence set across the bedsits of mid-nineties London, McBride holds new love under her fierce gaze, giving us all a chance to remember what it's like to fall hard for another.
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.
