Ratings31
Average rating4
A brilliantly funny novel about friends, lovers, Ireland in chaos, and a young woman desperately trying to manage all three
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.
Reviews with the most likes.
Strong Sally Rooney vibes with a sprinkling of Lena Dunham's Girls. So, devastating and beautiful and pulling on the strings on the parts of ourselves we hate.
Told my friends the plot of this book over drinks as if it were my own gossip... Juicy!
This was...... fine. Inoffensive, readable, but also quite boring. Definitely a book