"A mesmerising, perceptive exploration of how it feels to live with grief, shattered mother-daughter relations, and the meandering paths we take when trying to mend the broken pieces of ourselves."
Uniquely voiced, and raw with loss, longing and the loneliness of liminality, Rachel Connolly’s Lazy City presents a remarkably engaging, honest account of a young woman’s struggle to get back on track after losing her friend. The evocation of grief will chime a potent chord with readers who’ve experienced it, as will the protagonist’s faltering journey through fog to forge a new way of living in the wake of catastrophic loss.
Erin has returned to her Belfast hometown after a “terrible thing happened” — the death of her best friend, Kate. After dropping out of her London university, she initially moved back in with her mother before they fell out and she moved out to work as a live-in nanny. “Our arguments have a primordial quality,” Erin says of their brutally dysfunctional relationship.
One night, at the bar her artist friend Declan works in, she meets and hooks up with Matt, an American teacher who’s researching a novel. She also has a few encounters with an ex. While the contact and sex serve a function of sorts, there are complications, and Erin remains lost until she comes to an epiphany, realising that in returning to Belfast, “I was running away from my life, and what had happened, the sadness of it. From the way the world is now. But I was running towards something too… A place I could get to, or a person, or a state I could reach. But whether the thing itself is real or not, the instinct to get to it is. That longing.”
Fresh and incisive, Connolly has remarkable style and Lazy City is a haunting treasure of a book.
| Primary Genre | General Fiction |
| Other Genres: |
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.
Lazy City features in the following genres: General Fiction, Modern and Contemporary Fiction, Fiction
Lazy City is available in Paperback, Hardback, Ebook (Epub)
Lazy City was written by Rachel Connolly and published by Canongate Books
Lazy City has 288 pages
£15.29
