The Lesser Bohemians: A Novel

by Eimear McBride Narrated by Eimear McBride

Overview

A breathtaking award-winning novel about an extraordinary, all-consuming love affair
*
One night an eighteen-year-old Irish girl, recently arrived in London to attend drama school, meets an older man-a well-regarded actor in his own right.*While she is naive and thrilled by life in the big city, he is haunted by more than a few demons, and the clamorous relationship that ensues risks undoing them both.
*
A captivating story of passion and innocence, joy and discovery set against the vibrant atmosphere of 1990s London over the course of a single year, The Lesser Bohemians glows with the eddies and anxieties of growing up, and the transformative intensity of a powerful new love.

Winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction
Shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award
Shortlisted for the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize*
Shortlisted for the 2016 Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards Eason Novel of the Year

Editorial Reviews

MARCH 2017 - AudioFile

Eimear McBride was an actor before she was a writer. Her novels, especially as performed by her, are breathtakingly effective both as literature and as theater. The writing is elliptical but not confusing; she just clips out the bits of the sentence that don’t need saying. The technique packs her characters’ emotions more densely and gives you the sense of being inside another person’s head. Here it’s the head of an Irish girl in her first year at a London drama school as she falls into a chromosome-altering love affair with an older actor. This is gorgeous, heartbreaking work. This telling is so moving, so universal and yet so specific to these two gifted, damaged people, so powerful (and powerfully erotic) as to be unforgettable. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

Publishers Weekly

07/04/2016
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 ingénue, 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. (Sept.)

From the Publisher

Praise for THE LESSER BOHEMIANS

"[A] propulsive coming-of-age story... imbued with a captivating sense of youthful excitement and vulnerability."
—The New Yorker

“The confidence and the capacity are as good as anyone’s…there’s an openness, an inclusivity, a distinct lack of God-almightyness, that makes reading [McBride] such a pleasure.”
—Jeannette Winterson, New York Times Book Review

“The Lesser Bohemians” is every bit as stylistically resourceful as “Girl,” every bit as urgent and authentic. It is also more well-rounded, better. The narrative voice will be recognizable to readers of the earlier novel, capturing a snapshot of thought at the moment before grammar constrains it, what the author has referred to as a “stream of pre-consciousness.” The word order is once again scrambled to ingenious (and poetic) effect, clauses pared down to their impressionistic essences…For a second time, Ms. McBride has channeled the mental life of a narrator with an intensity, a lack of mediation, that few authors can achieve. “The Lesser Bohemians” is a full-on sensory experience—and another superlative achievement.”
—Wall Street Journal
 
“Spellbinding…[H]er stunning second novel shows that she has not only acquired fresh surfaces to work on, she has also developed exciting new brush strokes…McBride’s prose sings…The Lesser Bohemians recalls Samuel Beckett and Henry Miller. Ultimately, though, it is a fiercely original work, an extraordinary novel crafted by a fearless modern writer.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
 
“The Lesser Bohemians is a love story, yes, but it is really an electric and beautiful account of how the walls of self shift and buckle and are rebuilt.”
—NPR.org
 
 “Joycean…The novel is filled with intricate, imaginative wordplay…crafted by one of the most admired young talents in fiction.” 
—Scott Simon, NPR
 
“[A] powerful novel about desire.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine
 
“Not often does a novel so expertly seduce its readers into an alternate state of consciousness that it mimics an actual dream state, where everything solid is hazily just beyond reach. Eimear McBride, with her deployment of modernist technique reminiscent of James Joyce, elicits such a mental state throughout her new novel, The Lesser Bohemians ― really,
it’s the only way to read it.”
—Huffington Post
 
“This is above all, a love story: bare, achingly romantic, and crushingly felt.”
—Booklist, starred review

Library Journal

04/15/2016
Having won multiple honors (e.g., the Baileys Women's Prize) for her brilliant and coruscating first novel, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, McBride returns with the story of a naïve 18-year-old Irish lass studying acting in mid-1990s London. Naturally, she launches an affair with an established actor 20 years her senior. With a 75,000-copy first printing.

Kirkus Reviews

2016-07-04
The follow-up to A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (2014), the author’s groundbreaking, award-winning debut novel.It’s 1994 in London, and McBride’s narrator, 18-year-old Eily, arrives from Ireland to begin drama school. Wide-eyed and awed by the city and all its cacophonous activity, she soon meets an older actor in a bar (reading “his Penguin Dostoyevsky”) and embarks on a torrid—and increasingly tumultuous—love affair with him. Though he's 20 years her senior, it’s clear that he doesn’t necessarily have it all figured out; as the narrative progresses, we learn more about his skeleton-filled closet, details that help partially explain his erratic behavior. Most of the novel consists of Eily’s pulsing, fractured thoughts concerning her psychosexual awakening, though her lover’s lengthy disclosure of his past demons throws the narrative somewhat off-balance. Many of the trademarks of McBride’s first novel are present here—intense first-person interiority (details about the narrator’s surroundings are largely absent; for the majority of the book, readers are inside the occasionally claustrophobic confines of Eily’s head); halting, Joycean sentence construction; passionate, urgent descriptions of conflicting emotions—and fans should enjoy this one. However, it’s not likely to win the author many new readers. While A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing masterfully captured the narrator’s mental and emotional states across a range of ages, Eily remains stagnant in her obsessive pursuit of her addictive new love, and the novel runs about 50 pages too long. Still, the author is a confident stylist and produces enough dazzling sentences to keep the pages turning—e.g., describing a scene in which Eily and others snort cocaine, McBride writes, “ponytails like tidal waves slap tabletops and nostrils butterfly.”A unique, mostly engaging work from a talented writer who will hopefully take another step forward in her next novel.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171905873
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	09/20/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

THE AUDITION

Saturday 12 March 1994

I move. Cars move. Stock, it bends light. City opening itself behind. Here’s to be for its life is the bite and would be start of mine.

Remember. Look up. Like the face of god was lighting me through those grilles above, through windows once a church this hall, and old men watch below. Come in. Please go straight to the stage. I snag my skirt on continents of paint chipped out black by toes and heels, by fingers picking clicking for years. I’d do too if I was here. When I’ll be here. Will I be here? Take a moment, they say Then let’s have your first piece. I. Suck antique air and. Go.

    I don’t know but it’s done by some switch of the brain, this fooling off the girl I am. Giving tendril words to the dust-sunned air or twist from my mouth weeds of her until she’s made her way through time from Arden, Greece or whoever wrote these lines of words learned in my head. Innocent to the work of balconies or beds, I let her talk run free in me and bring her for the age.
    And after.
    They bait me. Strip me a bit. Ask who and you’re young, why not see the world first? Shouldn’t actors see so many things? But I’m sure I have in the deep of my brain. Against my tick-tocking minus in life – books and films, fancied plays I’ll be in, men surely meet, New York taxis maybe run for in elegant heels. Shouldn’t these outweigh what dun school skirts there’s been in this bud of life I own? And lower too, just left unsaid, time when life was something else but I’ve understood a whole world, all remaining is To Do. Can they not see this print on me? Ho ho, they flock You’re all grown-up certainly but second speech, if you would?
    Seated on the floor this, lino underfoot. Her giving out little thoughts, some simple things she’s understood. This lady in her simple skirt, hands open to a gentle earth and though I’m close inside my voice fills wide into the calm. Beseeches but such a quiet way. And this time they are with me, know in her I’ve done my time. May hold her up for looking at and gently set her down. Then let chipped paint oceans roll me back to their shore, hopeful as a breeze. And they only Thank you we’ll let you know. That’s it? Letter next week in the post. Go on out through the canteen. So my audition’s done and can’t be undone now.

From their path I stroll to the City no city, I think to Camden Town. London unspooling itself behind. Traffic all gadding in the midday shine. So many people. So much stone. All at once and streets ahead. I’ll bring it with. I will make myself of life here for life is this place and would be start of mine.

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