Fiction Book Group - Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan

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The July Fiction Book Group will be meeting via Zoom

Monday, July 8th • 6:30 PM ET / 11:30 PM IST via Zoom

Session open to all, no registration required.

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When a 10-year-old child is suspected of a violent crime, her family must face the truth about their past in this haunting, propulsive, psychologically keen story about class, trauma, and family secrets from “huge literary talent” (Karl Ove Knausgaard).



 FINALIST FOR THE FALLON BOOK CLUB SELECTION 



It's 1990 in London and Tom Hargreaves has it all: a burgeoning career as a reporter, fierce ambition and a brisk disregard for the "peasants" — ordinary people, his readers, easy tabloid fodder. His star seems set to rise when he stumbles across a sensational scoop: a dead child on a London estate, grieving parents beloved across the neighborhood, and the finger of suspicion pointing at one reclusive family of Irish immigrants and “bad apples”: the Greens.



At their heart sits Carmel: beautiful, otherworldly, broken, and once destined for a future beyond her circumstances until life – and love – got in her way. Crushed by failure and surrounded by disappointment, there's nowhere for her to go and no chance of escape. Now, with the police closing in on a suspect and the tabloids hunting their monster, she must confront the secrets and silences that have trapped her family for so many generations.

 

  • "Nolan’s prose is clean and exacting, with an almost clinical interest in the power of shame: class shame, sexual shame, national shame, the shame of the addict. It seems to rank high among Nolan’s writerly principles that the cure for shame is honesty, however ugly the truth is."

     WASHINGTON POST

  • “A visceral, knowing exploration of human misery and the ways we fail ourselves."

     CRIME READS

Megan Nolan

About the Author

Megan Nolan was born in 1990 in Waterford, Ireland. Her essays and reviews have been published by the New York TimesWhite Review, Guardian and Frieze amongst others. Her debut novel, Acts of Desperation, was the recipient of a Betty Trask Award, shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize.


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