The Lesser Bohemians
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4.1 • 7 Ratings
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- £5.49
Publisher Description
AN IRISH TIMES TOP 100 BEST IRISH BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY
WINNER OF THE JAMES TAIT BLACK MEMORIAL PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE
The vibrant energy of 1990s London. A year of passion and discovery. The anxiety and intensity of new love.
An eighteen-year-old Irish girl arrives in London to study drama and falls violently in love with an older actor. While she is naive and thrilled by life in the big city, he is haunted by demons. The clamorous relationship that ensues risks undoing them both. At once epic and exquisitely intimate, The Lesser Bohemians is a celebration of the dark and the light in love.
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.
