Eimear McBride was born in 1976 and grew up in Ireland. She currently lives in Norwich with her family. The Lesser Bohemians is her second novel.
The Lesser Bohemians: A Novel
Hardcover
- ISBN-13: 9781101903483
- Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
- Publication date: 09/20/2016
- Pages: 320
- Product dimensions: 6.50(w) x 8.70(h) x 1.10(d)
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The breathtaking new novel from Eimear McBride, about an extraordinary, all-consuming love affair
Eimear McBride’s debut novel A GIRL IS A HALF-FORMED THING was published in 2013 to an avalanche of praise: nominated for a host of literary awards, winner of the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction and the inaugural Goldsmith’s Prize, declared by Vanity Fair to be "One of the most groundbreaking pieces of literature to come from Ireland, or anywhere, in recent years," McBride’s bold, wholly original prose immediately established her as a literary force. Now, she brings her singular voice to an unlikely love story.
One night an eighteen-year-old Irish girl, recently arrived in London to attend drama school, meets an older man – a well-regarded actor in his own right. While she is naive and thrilled by life in the big city, he is haunted by more than a few demons, and the clamorous relationship that ensues risks undoing them both.
A captivating story of passion and innocence, joy and discovery set against the vibrant atmosphere of 1990s London over the course of a single year, THE LESSER BOHEMIANS glows with the eddies and anxieties of growing up, and the transformative intensity of a powerful new love.
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McBride’s second novel is more ambitious than her acclaimed debut, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, and it retains the uncompromisingly Joycean brogue and diary-like intimations of adolescence that made that first novel such a success. Set between 1994 and 1995, it follows 18-year-old Eily, a boozy ingénue, as she leaves her native Ireland to attend drama school in London. There, caught in whirl of excess and the shadow of IRA terrorism, she is mostly assigned stereotypically Irish bit parts, but finds herself captivated by a much older actor named Stephen, an ex-junkie estranged from his family and young daughter. Initially meeting without names, they embark on a tempestuous relationship that reveals the worst in both while offering Stephen a chance at redemption and Eily a future. But the real focus is McBride’s stream-of-consciousness prose, in which drinking is rendered as “pints turning telescope,” “the lightless hall sings sanctuary from the frenzy” of a violent encounter, and a night of youthful debauchery leaves the revelers with “Satan under every skin. Skinful under all our skin.” The story (especially when Stephen’s backstory hijacks the narrative) isn’t full enough to sustain McBride’s style, which comes to seem less and less an accurate shorthand for first love. Still, this sophomore effort is striking enough to continue McBride’s forging of a daring career. (Sept.)
Having won multiple honors (e.g., the Baileys Women's Prize) for her brilliant and coruscating first novel, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, McBride returns with the story of a naïve 18-year-old Irish lass studying acting in mid-1990s London. Naturally, she launches an affair with an established actor 20 years her senior. With a 75,000-copy first printing.
The follow-up to A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (2014), the author’s groundbreaking, award-winning debut novel.It’s 1994 in London, and McBride’s narrator, 18-year-old Eily, arrives from Ireland to begin drama school. Wide-eyed and awed by the city and all its cacophonous activity, she soon meets an older actor in a bar (reading “his Penguin Dostoyevsky”) and embarks on a torrid—and increasingly tumultuous—love affair with him. Though he's 20 years her senior, it’s clear that he doesn’t necessarily have it all figured out; as the narrative progresses, we learn more about his skeleton-filled closet, details that help partially explain his erratic behavior. Most of the novel consists of Eily’s pulsing, fractured thoughts concerning her psychosexual awakening, though her lover’s lengthy disclosure of his past demons throws the narrative somewhat off-balance. Many of the trademarks of McBride’s first novel are present here—intense first-person interiority (details about the narrator’s surroundings are largely absent; for the majority of the book, readers are inside the occasionally claustrophobic confines of Eily’s head); halting, Joycean sentence construction; passionate, urgent descriptions of conflicting emotions—and fans should enjoy this one. However, it’s not likely to win the author many new readers. While A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing masterfully captured the narrator’s mental and emotional states across a range of ages, Eily remains stagnant in her obsessive pursuit of her addictive new love, and the novel runs about 50 pages too long. Still, the author is a confident stylist and produces enough dazzling sentences to keep the pages turning—e.g., describing a scene in which Eily and others snort cocaine, McBride writes, “ponytails like tidal waves slap tabletops and nostrils butterfly.”A unique, mostly engaging work from a talented writer who will hopefully take another step forward in her next novel.