The Rachel Incident: A novel (Unabridged)
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4.3 • 61 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A USA TODAY BESTSELLER • A brilliantly funny novel about friends, lovers, Ireland in chaos, and a young woman desperately trying to manage all three • “O'Donoghue deepens the familiar coming-of-age premise with riveting moral complications." —People
"If you’ve ever been unsure what to do with your degree in English; if you’ve ever wondered when the rug-buying part of your life will start...if you’ve ever loved the wrong person, or the right person at the wrong time…In short, if you’ve ever been young, you will love The Rachel Incident like I did.” —Gabrielle Zevin, New York Times best-selling author of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it’s love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them.
When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred’s glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife. Aching with unrequited love, shot through with delicious, sparkling humor, The Rachel Incident is a triumph.
Customer Reviews
Genuine and refreshing
This is one of my favorite books of the year so far! The narrator really did a beautiful job balancing the characters and anticipating their emotions and it syncs so well! This is just a beautiful, honest story that I think will appeal to a lot of people. It’s so pure and true in its writing and conveying the messiness of youth which demands attention in a subtle and nearly inevitable way. I already miss the characters and I genuinely hope they’re doing well. This book is about life and the complex simplicity of what it means to be a growing, imperfect human being in a hostile world where we’re constantly being reminded that security and breath itself are not guaranteed. I am now craving more young, well done, hot mess stories. I love Irish writers and what they bring to the table. If you like this you’ll probably enjoy Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors and/or Sirens and Muses by Antonia Angress. But this book right here will always be closest to my heart for its unapologetic truth and off beat humor.