Description
By (author) Nolan, Megan
Short /annotation:
She’s twenty-three and in love with love. The affair is quickly consuming.
But this relationship is unpredictable, and behind his perfect looks is a mean streak. The search for a fix is frantic, and taking a dangerous turn…
We’re all looking to get what we want – but do we know what we need?
:
She’s twenty-three and in love with love. He’s older, and the most beautiful man she’s ever seen. The affair is quickly consuming.
But this relationship is unpredictable, and behind his perfect looks is a mean streak. She”s intent on winning him over, but neither is living up to the other’s ideals. He keeps emailing his thin, glamorous ex, and she”s starting to give in to secret, shameful cravings of her own. The search for a fix is frantic, and taking a dangerous turn…
We’re all looking to get what we want – but do we know what we need?
Review quote:
Please believe the hype . . . Nolan”s book describes a very particular experience and it does so with rare intelligence and courage . . . [Her] headlong, fearless prose feels like salt wind on cracked lips. You wince and you thrill.
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Deeply felt and seriously, spikily intelligent . . . The millennial author everyone should be watching right now.
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Tapping into the zeitgeist comes one of the books of 2021: Megan Nolan”s Acts of Desperation . . . a heartbreaking-but-resonating portrait of one woman”s savage mistreatment of herself in the name of love.
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There is so much to admire in this extremely impressive first novel, which captures an intense experience with clarity and style. It is fully itself, and flawless in its way.
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Nigh-on impossible not to devour.
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[A] fearless debut . . . Amusing, relatable, crushing . . . Nolan”s gutsiest achievement is reclaiming the female experience of love and desire in all its shades from lighter literature, making of it something frequently unpretty yet intensely vital.
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Oh my god! Such brilliant writing about female desire, co-dependant love, the ownership that”s taken of female bodies and how it corrupts our relationship to them. I identified hugely. Incredibly honest and visceral.
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It”s impossible to tear yourself away . . . This is more than simple victimhood. This is a hard frank look at something uglier and more discomforting . . . I couldn”t stop reading Acts of Desperation.
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A mesmerising debut that is a masterpiece from the opening sentence to the bitter end, and everything in between.
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I loved this book . . . It triumphs because it takes a risk . . . We find ourselves hurtling towards an ending that is surprising, satisfying, subversive . . . Deeply affecting.
Biographical note:
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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