Love was the final consolation, would set ablaze the fields of my life in one go, leaving nothing behind. I thought of it as a force which would clean me and by its presence make me worthy of it. There was no religion in my life after early childhood, and a great faith in love was what I had cultivated instead. Oh, don't laugh at me for this, for being a woman who says this to you. I hear myself speak.
Even now, even after all that took place between us, I can still feel how moved I am by him. Ciaran was that downy, darkening blond of a baby just leaving its infancy. He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. None of it mattered in the end; what he looked like, who he was, the things he would do to me. To make a beautiful man love and live with me had seemed - obviously, intuitively - the entire point of life. My need was greater than reality, stronger than the truth, more savage than either of us would eventually bear. How could it be true that a woman like me could need a man's love to feel like a person, to feel that I was worthy of life? And what would happen when I finally wore him down and took it?
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Imprint: Jonathan Cape
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Published: 04/03/2021
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ISBN: 9781787332492
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Length: 224 Pages
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RRP: £14.99
Reviews
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This is an incredible debut by @mmegannolan. Poignant, poetic, raw and utterly unique - I couldn't stop reading. Pre-order it now.
Pandora Sykes, Instagram
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A darkly rich and heady exploration of hunger and unraveling, Acts of Desperation is unashamed and honest. It questions the truest way to inhabit a body and shows us the horror and the beauty in learning to be alone.
Jessica Andrews
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Megan Nolan writes with piercing vulnerability and precision. Her debut novel, Acts of Desperation is a blistering anti-romance about the seductive destruction of trying to find self-worth in the gaze of another.
Catherine Lacey
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Megan Nolan is a huge literary talent, and her first novel,Acts of Desperation, is a love story like no other. The writing is intense and honest, with a rare access to real life, but it is also reflective and full of insights, and with this combination the novel manages to separate the idea of love and the experience of it, and take the reader to the place where it comes into being.
Karl Ove Knausgaard
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Acts of Desperation is stunning and I'm grateful it exists. Megan Nolan writes so powerfully about vulnerability. A book that you live in while you're reading it, and which then lives on inside you.
Olivia Sudjic
