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I related to the experience of working in a pub, which I did for most of my teenage years, and how it feels so cosy and time is suspended there, and you find yourself becoming friends with a lot of people you'd never talk to outside. A book about finding home in a strange new place, and finding yourself when your life is a mess. The hotly anticipated second novel by the Sunday Times bestselling author of Mother Mother Orla makes a few poor and impulsive decision along the way, but hey didn’t we all in our early 20’s? A heady mix of thrills and heartbreak . . . I enjoyed it so so much' GRAHAM NORTON'What [Macmanus has] managed to do with London, and what London means to different generations of Irish people, is terrific, and deeply moving' RODDY DOYLEI'm a Londoner now. I enjoyed all the characters, it kind of gave me a YA feel, in a good way. It reminded me a lot of How To Build A Girl by Caitlin Moran. The flaws of Orla kind of added to this as well, and I liked Annie's perspective on this at the end.
The Mess We’re In by Annie Macmanus is published with Wildfire and is described by Sara Cox as ‘beautifully painted, well set up and realistic’. A powerful and occasionally polemical appeal to reason in politics; if you're despairing in search of an antidote to the poison of "alternative facts", here's your book. Like any good political text, there's something here to offend everyone. You'll want to cheer, high-five and occasionally shout your disagreement, but what you won't want to do is put it down.' A book about finding home in a strange new place, and finding yourself when your life is a mess. The hotly anticipated second novel by the Sunday Times bestselling author of Mother Mother . But as the hype around the band intensifies, so does the hedonism, and relationships in the house are growing strained. This is the story of a young woman thrashing through life, trying to find home in a strange new place.While Orla's own dreams seem to be going nowhere, Shiva are on the brink of something big. But as the hype around the band intensifies, so does the hedonism, and relationships in the house are growing strained. Annie Macmanus’s second novel hints at what to expect from the title alone - “The Mess We’re In”. Dubliner Orla has moved to England, hoping her life will finally begin, that she will get her break into music and become the person she assumes she will be. But this is not a Cinderella story, and Orla’s life is a mess when we meet her first (moving with her best friend Neema from Cheltenham to London), and things don’t really change as the narrative progresses. It’s the turn of the millennium and, landing in London with nothing but her CD collection and demo tape, Orla Quinn moves into a squalid Kilburn house with her best mate and a band called Shiva.
A very astute overview of problems with our political systems in the present day. Not just in Australia, but in other major allies as well (the UK and USA) It describes how greed has overtaken humanity. How people are losing confidence in the people they chose to represent them.I perhaps need a bit more time to digest this book and all that it made me feel. The things I really loved was the authenticity of life as a 20-something just out of college in the year 2001, I was just a year younger than the character at this time and it made me reminisce so much about the music/gig scene and political feelings of the time. Although Orla is nothing like me, I felt I understood where she was coming from and in particular her relationships with her family. The correlation with Orla's Da and what I also experienced in my mid-20s was very well written and I felt all the emotions in my core. Annie McManus writes beautifully with such description and I truly enjoyed absorbing every word lyrically. At the end of the book Keane offers ten apparently sensible suggestions for countering these negative drives, which are intended to help us see through what might otherwise seem to be insurmountable impasses. Whether one agrees with them or not, they will at least offer some hope that all is not quite lost. Men are unfortunately the undoing of Neema and Orla’s close friendship. As Orla experiences and experiments with sexual freedom (Moses, Vinnie etc) Neema struggles with watching her friend be so free when she is having to live under such conservative boundaries depicted by her Indian family. And also, Orla is really really messy, which drives Neema crazy.
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