The Rachel Incident

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 24 ABR 2023

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.