Lazy City
Rachel Connolly
Available as Hardback, eBook, Downloadable audio
An electrifying debut set in Northern Ireland exploring dysfunctional relationships, love and heartbreak as a young woman grieves the loss of her best friend
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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“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
“Somehow both tightly controlled and highly spontaneous, Rachel Connolly’s Lazy City is refreshingly open to the world. Frank, attentive, free of artifice or emotional contrivances, Connolly brings something new to any subject she shines her singular intelligence on”
Nicole Flattery
“A skilful, expressive and subtly subversive debut”
irish Times
“A compelling exploration of grief, uncertainty and disappointment, and a convincing portrait of Belfast’s normalisation, such as it is. Indeed, where a Troubles novel might have foregrounded trauma, Connolly focuses instead on the impact of more ordinary, but still devastating, loss”
irish Independent
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. She has also featured as a guest to discuss her work on This American Life and several BBC radio programs.