The Rachel Incident
A novel
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4.2 • 242 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A USA TODAY BESTSELLER • A brilliantly funny novel about friends, lovers, Ireland in chaos, and a young woman desperately trying to manage all three • “O'Donoghue deepens the familiar coming-of-age premise with riveting moral complications." —People
"If you’ve ever been unsure what to do with your degree in English; if you’ve ever wondered when the rug-buying part of your life will start...if you’ve ever loved the wrong person, or the right person at the wrong time…In short, if you’ve ever been young, you will love The Rachel Incident like I did.” —Gabrielle Zevin, New York Times best-selling author of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it’s love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them.
When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred’s glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife. Aching with unrequited love, shot through with delicious, sparkling humor, The Rachel Incident is a triumph.
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.
