LoveReading Says
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.
Joanne Owen
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Rachel Connolly Press Reviews
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
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
This restless, big-hearted, accomplished novel examines the delicate, elaborate fabric of communication after grief. In a voice that is skirting, comic and attentive, Lazy City embodies the traits I admire in Rachel Connolly's writing: its charisma, nervous energy and verve -- LUCIE ELVEN
Absolutely LOVED IT. A coming of age novel set in Belfast and delivered in the most beautifully clear and engaging prose -- FRANKIE BOYLE
Startling, propulsive and bracingly funny, Lazy City is a powerful debut by a gifted writer. Every word of it feels real and true in a way that only the most skilfully imagined fiction can. It feels like a book that needed to exist. I loved it -- MARK O'CONNELL
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
This is a compelling and very moving novel about the aftermath of grief. Connolly captures the bewilderment, raw pain, and emotional paralysis of a young woman upended by loss. There is a quiet intensity - and an addictive quality - in the writing that slowly, cumulatively affects the reader. This is a marvellous evocation of the painful distance that exists between people and the eternal longing left in the wake of a lost loved one -- MARY COSTELLO
Few writers capture the human condition and what drives social behaviour with the elegance, clarity and restraint that Rachel Connolly does. Funny, intelligent and dynamic, Lazy City paints a beautiful modern portrait of Belfast and the complex, self-imploding characters who navigate it. It shows how individuals attempt to find meaning and direction in the world, small cities and each other's lives -- JASON OKUNDAYE
Rachel Connolly is a thoughtful and funny writer who is brilliant on all of the slippery states: desire, grief, intoxication. I love how Lazy City picks apart what makes us, and what we carry with us, whether we like it or not. There's a spontaneity to Lazy City, an in-the-momentness that's utterly compelling -- REBECCA WATSON
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
