Lazy City: A Novel

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There is sometimes a charm in a small, quiet novel in a place where nothing really happens but you end up falling for the main characters or their relationships. However this didn't really happen with Lazy City. It's a constant cycle of the main character drinking, doing drugs, sleeping with the wrong people and having thoughts about what she should or shouldn't be doing with her life. It's more of a character meander where nothing really changes or develops, things just kind of keep happening. RC: Women are policed in all manner of ways, including in how we communicate. I knew if I added in a big breakdown scene Erin would be more of a sympathetic character to a lot of people . She’s quite vulnerable in a lot of ways but she doesn’t perform it. Because who would she do it to? She isn’t someone with a good support network. What I have noticed is that people who perform vulnerability are usually the most supported people, who have people around that are receptive to it. If you don’t, you just have to live it out. I really wanted to do that for a female character.

There’s real beauty in how Connolly crafts female relationships. Her writing of the dysfunctional relationship between Erin and her mother is akin to the care with which Anne Enright writes these dynamics. But it is Kate who looms over the novel. I really wanted to get the present tense and people’s dialect and the way that thoughts and speech [occur] down. I was doing a lot of experiments to try and get stuff right.” Megan Nolan recently wrote about ‘Ordinary Human Failings’; in Lazy City, Connolly skilfully captures ‘ordinary human sadness’ in a very similar vein to Michael Magee’s ‘Close to Home’ but from a woman’s perspective. In a recent essay for The Guardian, Connolly describes releasing a debut in the same year as fellow Belfast author Michael Magee. KG: You have a very analytical writing style, present in your non-fiction work too, with all these logical exercises where Erin weighs up the motives and actions of other people. I’d be interested to hear more about your literary influences.I really enjoyed this. Connolly has a deeply moving and engaging literary style. Her descriptions of Belfast, through the lens of grief, memory and religion are immersive and illustrative. You do not need to be from Belfast to enjoy this but if you have lived there, I imagine the book will take on an additional meaning for the reader.

Readers long used to the trend of ‘Sad Girl Lit’ await Erin’s descent into chaos, but Lazy City resists this route. Instead, it is poignant in asking: who is afforded the space for a full meltdown? Erin carries on with her work as an au pair as her world falls apart around her. When novels come, they come not single spies, but in battalions. In recent decades, we’ve said hello and goodbye to the campus novel, the Hampstead divorce novel, lad-lit and much more. You may have noticed that we’re currently living through a glut of novels about young women barrelling, or bumbling, their way through their twenties – and quite a few about young men, too.

I am so thrilled to be working with Francis, who understands this book so well," she said. "And always grateful to my agent Tracy, for seeing what I was trying to do in my fiction from an early stage.” In the wake of the death of her best friend, Erin leaves London for home in Belfast, taking up an au pair job which conveniently gets her away from her mother, with whom Erin has a fractious relationship. She spends her nights at the bar where her childhood friend Declan works, and it's there Erin strikes up a relationship of sorts with a visiting American lecturer. In parallel, she reignites an old flame with her ex Mikey. Overall I loved it, I loved Erin & was really rooting for her. She’s just a girlie who deserves a nice life at the end of it all. 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. Truly extraordinary. With vivid detail and a deceptively effortless narrative voice, Lazy City masterfully weaves a deeply personal and universally relevant tale. Rachel Connolly's writing is layered and beautiful, offering new perspectives on the everyday moments that shape our lives. A must-read’

Canongate has snapped up Lazy City, a coming-of-age novel exploring the aftermath of death, by debut author Rachel Connolly. In the wry and compassionate Lazy City, Rachel Connolly deftly captures both the intoxicating chaos and listlessness of young adulthood, when life seems both full of possibility and impossibly elusive’ One person (I’m sorry to say this was again a man) who works in the vague publishing ecosystem declared: “Oh Michael Magee’s book. That was a great book! I loved his book. I’m sure you’ll like it.” I told him I’d heard as much, and I was excited to read it. Then: “And you have a book out too set in Belfast. Well, you might even get to interview him about his book.” I smiled and told him that would be fantastic. Then off he went on a long rant about the sorry state of a publishing industry in which women are overhyped and praised constantly while men are ignored, or worse, condescended.The elements are set, and what follows is sometimes predictable, as Erin pinballs between men, engages in circular conversations as everyone gets blasted on coke and ketamine, and goes through labyrinthine application processes for dead-end jobs. But there are many pleasures. Connolly gives Erin a dry, wry voice, and one that’s frequently very funny: “Some men start talking about their dads, or worse, their mums,” she observes of the pre-sex verbal dance. Erin thinks as she talks, and opens up the reader’s thinking as well. “How is it that I can describe this pattern so clearly but still be caught inside it?” she wonders. Elsewhere, she baulks at her peers’ perpetual ramblings on politics: “What if the problem is much deeper than capitalism? If the problem is human nature, what do we do then?”

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 only portions I wasn’t super keen on was the religious stuff. Erin finds solace in empty churches to kinda work through her emotions & I found those portions a bit dull. As a terrible heathen I could not relate but I think they’d hit home a bit more if you had a Catholic upbringing. 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. Finkemeyer also admits that this genre she loves has some faults. “It’s maybe less than ideal that we’re reading characters that are carbon copies of each other,” she says. “There is something problematic about millennial privileged women reading about millennial privileged women who are writing books about millennial privileged women. It becomes a snake eating its tail.”A] perceptive debut… Connolly draws the reader along by making each well-honed scene reverberate with emotion. This thoughtful character portrait is worth a look.—Publishers Weekly