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Ordinary Human Failings

Ordinary Human Failings

Summary

Brought to you by Penguin.

Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2024.

A Highly Anticipated Novel of 2023 in The Times, i-D, Esquire and 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.

©2023 Megan Nolan (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Reviews

  • 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

About the author

Megan Nolan

Megan Nolan was born in 1990 in Waterford, Ireland and is currently based in New York. Her essays and reviews have been published by the New York Times, White Review, Guardian and Frieze amongst others. For her debut novel, Acts of Desperation, Nolan was the recipient of a Betty Trask Award, shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Ordinary Human Failings was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, and shortlisted for the Nero Book Award for Fiction, the Gordon Burn Prize and the RSL Encore Award.
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