Author(s): Megan Nolan

Novel | Ireland | Gordon Burn Prize short list 2024

A Best Book of 2023 in The Times, Sunday Times, i-D, the Guardian

When we look beyond the headlines, everyone has a story to tell 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 looks set to rise when he stumbles across a scoop: a dead child on a London estate, grieving parents loved across the neighbourhood, 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.

Review: Megan Nolan's debut novel saw her grouped with other Irish millennial women such as Sally Rooney and Naoise Dolan. But with her ambitious and insightful second novel, Ordinary Human Failings, Nolan makes it clear she is not a manifestation of a type, but rather a writer to be read on her own terms * Financial Times *
One masterful novel... Nolan has excelled herself: Ordinary Human Failings is a raw, pulsing thing... A writer who's still at the start of what promises to be a splendid career. Ordinary Human Failings is a bold and beautiful second novel... daring in all the right ways, but compassionate when it needs to be * Daily Telegraph *
There is something wonderfully ordinary about this book... Nolan has set out to make a plain three-legged stool rather than an ornate grandfather clock. The corridors of contemporary literature are stuffed with grandfather clocks with faulty mechanisms. How much more valuable is this modest, well-made thing * Sunday Times *
Nolan's novel is dark in subject, yet retains a tender faith in a person's, or a family's, capacity for change * New Statesman, *Books of the Year* *
Ambitious and original... I loved its humanity and generosity... I can't wait to read whatever comes next -- DAVID NICHOLLS, author of One Day and You Are Here
Tightly written, full of wisdom, insight and sympathy - terrific! -- CLARE CHAMBERS, author of Small Pleasures
As much of a compulsive read as the first novel * The Times *
A subtle, accomplished and lyrical study of familial and intergenerational despair, a quiet book about quiet lives... An excellent novel: politically astute, furious and compassionate... A genuine achievement * Guardian *
The millennial author everyone should be watching right now * Daily Telegraph *
Nolan has crafted a novel full of brutal, illuminating truths * Sunday Times, *Books of the Year* *

Author Biography: Megan Nolan lives in London and was born in 1990 in Waterford, Ireland. Her essays, fiction and reviews have been published in The New York Times, The White Review, The Sunday Times, The Village Voice, The Guardian and in the literary anthology, Winter Papers. She writes a fortnightly column for the New Statesman. This is her first novel.