Lazy City
Rachel Connolly
Available as Hardback, eBook, Downloadable audio
An electrifying debut set in Belfast exploring dysfunctional relationships, love and heartbreak as a young woman grieves the loss of her best friend
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BETTY TRASK PRIZE
Following the death of her best friend, Erin has to get out of London. Returning home to Belfast, an au pair job provides a partial refuge from her grief and her volatile relationship with her mother. Erin spends late nights at the bar where her childhood friend Declan works. There Erin meets an American academic who is also looking to get lost. Parallel to this she reconnects with an old flame, Mikey. This brings its own web of complications.
With a startlingly fresh and original voice – jarringly funny, cranky, often hungover – Lazy City depicts the strange, meandering aftermath that follows disaster.
“Here is a debut to savour, a brilliant and vivid new voice to guide us through the calamities of the contemporary”
Kevin Barry
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“Rachel Connolly is a bright new star in fiction. Connolly’s beautifully drawn portrait of modem Belfast is fresh and quietly subversive and her prose is incisive and sharp. A must read”
Eliza Clark
“In the wry and compassionate Lazy City, Rachel Connolly deftly captures both the intoxicating chaos and listlessness of young adulthood, when life seems both full of possibility and impossibly elusive”
Colin Barrett
“Crisp, clear-eyed and witty writing that looks bravely at complicated emotions and renders them fully real. Connolly’s characters and their flawed, human attempts at redemption will stay with me for a long time”
Monica Heisey
“It’s also a novel about trauma and its aftermath: again, a common theme today, but done sophisticatedly here, with a quality of thinking rare in a debut … Connolly gives Erin a dry, wry voice, and one that’s frequently very funny … Lazy City exhibits an understanding of the importance of our homeland as the container that shapes us … I felt better after reading this book. Connolly is a writer in whom I have faith”
John Self
daily Telegraph
Rachel Connolly
Rachel Connolly was born in 1993 in Belfast and now lives in London. She has written for the New York Times, New York Magazine, the Guardian and many other publications. Her fiction has been published in the Stinging Fly and Granta. Her debut novel Lazy City was shortlisted for the 2024 Betty Trask Prize.