Lazy City: A Novel

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I can't finish without mentioning the drugs. THE DRUGS. Wtf. Do all young people do this many drugs or is it just the youth of Belfast? There's a whole chapter of hedonistic drug-taking and casual chat about the best way to pulverise your cocaine to make it more palatable. Just me? The ways in which men and women interact is also at odds with the kinds of male/female dynamic we’re used to.

As much as it stages an actual grief, Lazy City explores less immediate forms of mourning. With the looming threat of climate destruction, automated job rejections and depressing new-build flats, this is a Belfast delicately poised between past, present and future, symbolised in granular descriptions of its marbled skies. Far from idle, Connolly captures Erin’s world with her signature precision that never quite allows a word or idea to rest. The only constant in Erin’s life is her faith. She visits several churches, and reveals her grief and disconnection in prayer. Erin betrays, and is deceived by, the two men she sleeps with, and yet it is some measure of Connolly’s skill that we retain sympathy for her flawed, messy heroine.

The book certainly adheres to some of the post-Rooney hallmarks of modern fiction. It is certainly not a plot-driven novel nor are all of the characters gripping or developed. But the book more than makes up for it with the exploration of Erin's introspection and sanctuary as her life shifts after Kate's death and she is reintroduced to old relationships.

So the idea of a rivalry didn’t make much sense to me. And then I read Close to Home and it was wonderful, absolutely wonderful, and I wanted to be friends with Michael Magee. I read an early copy of the novel on NetGalley UK. The book was published in the UK on the 24th of August 2023 by Canongate.

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Connolly is strong on friendship, intimacy, dysfunctional relationships, the transactional nature of casual sex, where each person is seeking something – relief, escape, distraction – from the other. The details of alcohol and drug-fuelled sessions are similarly vibrant. The milieu and thematic concerns call to mind Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperations and, particularly, Michael Magee’s Close To Home. (Connolly wrote an entertaining article on the tiresome inevitability of such comparisons earlier this year for the Guardian, a valiant attempt at reclaiming the narrative.) A compelling exploration of grief, uncertainty and disappointment, and a convincing portrait of Belfast’s normalisation, such as it is. Indeed, where a Troubles novel might have foregrounded trauma, Connolly focuses instead on the impact of more ordinary, but still devastating, loss.—Luke Warde, Irish Independent The debut novel from Rachel Connolly , a London-based writer from Belfast, Lazy City stages Erin’s return to her hometown after the sudden death of her best friend. As a live-in au pair, both her home and work are a temporary arrangement as she ambivalently decides how to move forward: “This feeling of trying to plan around many variables, and the ways I might possibly feel, is like plotting a course along a shifting surface.” In her social life, Erin struggles to feel connected, sensing others at a slight remove, whether it’s her ex-boyfriend Mikey or her old friend Declan. At Madame George, the bar where Declan works, she meets an attractive American called Matt and they start an unlikely relationship. “The loneliness in him means something to the loneliness in me,” thinks Erin.