Description

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 some refuge from her grief and her relentless mother. She spends her spare daytime sitting in quiet churches and her free nights at the bar where her childhood friend Declan works.

Erin is grateful for the distraction offered by, first, a good-looking American academic, and then the reappearance in her life of an old flame. They offer delightful diversions. But Erin must eventually confront herself.

Publisher Review

Here is a debut to savour, a brilliant and vivid new voice to guide us through the calamities of the contemporary — KEVIN BARRY 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 * * Connolly strikes the by now familiar tone of confusion and melancholy, but with a piercing penetration and observational clarity . . . Profound * * Guardian * * It’s an elegant, funny book about that least elegant and funny thing: grief * * Observer * * A skilful, expressive and subtly subversive debut * * Irish Times * * Absolutely LOVED IT. A coming of age novel set in Belfast and delivered in the most beautifully clear and engaging prose — FRANKIE BOYLE 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