Publishers Weekly
10/30/2023
Irish author Nolan (Acts of Desperation) delivers an insightful if lugubrious tale of a family under suspicion for a neighbor girl’s murder. Carmel Green, a young unwed Irish mother in 1990 England, once believed she was “destined for special things.” Now, feeling painfully ordinary, she mourns her faded promise. Carmel and her 10-year-old daughter, Lucy, live with Carmel’s father and brother, both of whom are alcoholics. Her mother, an affable woman who held the family together, died two years ago. Nolan alternates perspectives between the four Greens and Tom, an ambitious newspaper reporter who becomes interested in the family when their three-year-old neighbor is strangled to death, and suspicion falls on Lucy. After the police take Lucy into custody, Tom sequesters Carmel and the men in a small hotel, where he plies them with alcohol in hopes of getting enough material to write a “major, state-of-the-nation piece” on the family of a child murderess. The Greens’ revelations are by turn ironic and sad. Though the gloomy subject matter makes for rough going, Nolan is a gifted writer, capable of stunningly precise observations. This unflinching tale provokes. (Feb.)
From the Publisher
Nolan's prose is cool, elegant and, at times, stunningly beautiful.” —Dominique Sisley, DAZED
“The final pages...moved me to tears. This is a fine novel by an author who, at just thirty-three, already has exceptional skill and nerve.”—Emma Garman, LITERARY REVIEW
“Insightful…Nolan is a gifted writer, capable of stunningly precise observations. This unflinching tale provokes.”—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“A fearless writer... marks a confident evolution in her writing.” —Bookseller
“Nolan, the princess of Dublin’s underdog arts and letters renaissance, investigates salacious street crimes and the agency of children. An unformulaic procedural wherein gossip transmutes itself into dull familial terror.”—ZYZZYVA MAGAZINE
“A novel that resists the obvious. ... Though the novel concludes — perhaps not entirely persuasively — on a note of hope, this fierce and relentless account of a family in crisis is almost unbearably bleak.”—NYT BOOK REVIEW EDITOR'S CHOICE SELECTION
“Megan Nolan’s sophomore novel refines and expands upon themes found in her best-selling debut, Acts of Desperation….Readers familiar with Nolan’s first novel will discover a more confident writing voice in the second, which contains a complex plot aimed at confronting familiar ideas of misuse and obsession with a wider scope on media and politics. Ordinary Human Failings—recently longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction alongside books by other established Irish authors like Claire Kilroy and Anne Enright—is one of my personal favorite books in recent years.”—CHICAGO REVIEW OF BOOKS
FEBRUARY 2024 - AudioFile
While Nolan's novel begins as a police procedural, it soon evolves, with the help of narrator Jessica Regan, into a study of hereditary hopelessness. In England, as police investigate the murder of a small child, the novel pulls back the curtain on life in the 1990s with a focus on political and social forces of the period. Regan's prodigious range guides the portrayal of the desperate Green family and is both heartrending and dour. This family of Irish immigrants fled their homeland when their teen daughter, Carmel, turned up pregnant and son, Ritchie, dove deeper and deeper into alcoholism. Reagan uses an empathetic tone to portray characters who are carrying generational trauma. R.O. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2023-11-04
The death of a little girl incites controversy, blame, and exploitation in 1990s England.
Ever since she was a baby, Lucy Green never seemed quite right: That’s what her neighbors tell the police officers and journalists swarming their London apartment complex after she’s blamed for the death of 3-year-old Mia Enright. Lucy’s family—her loving grandmother, Rose; reclusive grandfather, John; alcoholic uncle, Richie; and unfit teenage mother, Carmel—arrived in England from Ireland shortly before her birth. In the 10 years since, Lucy’s grandmother, her primary caretaker, died, the surviving adult family members each spun into their own detached, dysfunctional orbits, and Lucy clobbered a classmate with a rock and acquired a reputation. “That little scumbag” is how Tom Hargreaves, the smarmy journalist insinuating himself into the family’s scandal-scarred life, hears her described. Tom can see the headlines already: One little girl murdering another, the cast of scoundrels, the stained family history—it’s the perfect scoop, if it turns out to be true. His journalistic playbook includes lying, bribing, deceiving, and manipulating; he’s equally eager to sequester the family from the eyes of competing journalists and to hoist the tent for his own media circus. As the police interrogate Lucy, Tom does the same to her family members, hungry for any morsel of disgrace. In the process, Carmel reflects on her miserable, dissociative pregnancy, and Richie and John steep in the betrayals and substance abuse of their past. Nolan’s writing is equally painful and propulsive. As you turn the pages, anxious to learn the truth about Lucy and Mia, the story seems to mock your very interest in it: Aren’t you, too, enthralled by the scandal, entranced by these front-page-worthy girls and their pigtailed barbarity?
Suffused with empathy, Nolan’s novel expertly illuminates the parts of ourselves we try to keep in the dark.
