Description

‘I love this woman’s writing. Golden sentences’ Diana Evans

‘She has already been compared with writers such as Eimear McBride, Ali Smith and Claire Louise Bennett, and indeed Niamh Campbell does add a distinctive new voice to Irish literature… Witty, fiery, wistful and even shocking, with engrossing heady prose, Campbell’s style is unique’ Irish Independent

‘An immensely enjoyable novel, and a great validation of Campbell’s uncanny emotional insight’ Megan Nolan, Sunday Independent

‘Young then. Before Alva and everything.’

Cormac is a photographer. Approaching forty and still single, he suddenly finds himself ‘the leftover man’.
Through talent and charm, he has escaped small town life and a haunted family. But now his peers are all getting divorced, dying, or buying trampolines in the suburbs. Cormac is dating former students, staying out all night and receiving boilerplate rejection emails for his work, propped up by a constellation of the women and ex-lovers in his life.

In the last weeks of the year, Cormac meets Caroline, an ambitious young dancer, and embarks on a miniature odyssey of intimacy. Simultaneously, he must take responsibility for his married brother, whose mid-life crisis forces them both to reckon with a death in the family that hangs over those left behind.

Set in Dublin, a city built on burial pits, We Were Young is a dazzlingly clever, deeply enjoyable novel from a Sunday Times Short Story Award-Winning author.

‘In 30 years from now will some literary critic be asking what is meant by “Campbellesque”? That would not surprise me in the slightest’ Irish Times

Publisher Review

WE WERE YOUNG is a truly exceptional novel, by an exceptional writer -- Adrian Duncan, author of LOVE NOTES FROM A GERMAN BUILDING SITE A beguiling, remarkable work of art. It renders exquisitely the melancholy of living in an always changing Dublin, and of family sorrow which is always threatening to break through the surface of its silence. It feels like an instant classic of Irish literature -- Megan Nolan, author of ACTS OF DESPERATION WE WERE YOUNG captures an Ireland I've never before seen in print, namely the erotic and artistic lives of a generation displaced. It is a stunning book that cracked me open more than once. Campbell's sentences are nothing short of magnificent. -- Sue Rainsford, author of FOLLOW ME TO GROUND This is trenchant, lucid writing. Niamh Campbell's novel is somehow both sharp and forgiving, steely and warm. With WE WERE YOUNG, Campbell takes up her place as one of the finest Irish stylists of her generation -- Sean Hewitt, author of TONGUES ON FIRE