A book begging to be read on the beach, with the sun warming the sand and salt in the air: pure escapism. Excels in its measured and realistic portrait of grief but struggles to develop into a propulsive narrative.

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. Crisp, clear-eyed and witty writing that looks bravely at complicated emotions and renders them fully real. Connolly’s characters and their flawed, human attempts at redemption will stay with me for a long time’ Coming to terms with grief is something of a cliché, instead Erin carries on much as any other twenty-something in Belfast would do: nights out, mediocre sex, and showing up to work. Grieving or otherwise, what else is there to be done?In this sense, Lazy City is both a ‘Belfast’ novel and a state-of-the-world novel, as it examines not only how we see ourselves, but how we interact with universal concerns, from climate change to grief. 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. Somehow both tightly controlled and highly spontaneous, Rachel Connolly’s Lazy City is refreshingly open to the world. Frank, attentive, free of artifice or emotional contrivances, Connolly brings something new to any subject she shines her singular intelligence on” RC: I was talking to the writer Michael Magee about this because his novel Close to Home is explicitly autobiographical but he never gets asked about that. It’s a question that, for a man, seems invasive. Whereas for a woman it’s this sort of peeking, wanting to see more under the covers. I have been asked this question and thought: would I not have made it more flattering?! I like Erin, but I don’t think she comes off so well in a lot of ways. If it were based on me, surely I’d have made it a hero’s journey where I get the boy in the end?

KG: With the church, which offers Erin a place of safety, you also emphasise the way that Erin doesn’t really have a proper home and the context of the current housing crisis. Clark suggests that the people who tend to read this supposedly dark fiction wouldn’t be comfortable with something truly sinister. She also believes the marketing reflects the fact that commissioning editors are, in her experience, mostly privately educated and wealthy. RC: I personally don’t love books where characters are complaining about renting a mouldy flat in zone three, because everybody has to do it. But, I think something about Erin is how at the minute – and this isn’t class-based at all – people rely on their family a lot and Erin is not someone who can do that. She can’t mess things up and sleep somewhere for six months. It’s not even something we treat as a form of privilege because it’s so widespread. I hear something said sometimes about Belfast that I have a little bit of a question mark over, which is […] oh, it’s not changed at all since the Troubles. I don’t think that’s true […] My mum grew up in the Bogside in Derry. The level of access I have to things versus the level of access [she had] is not comparable.”

The finished product, Lazy City, is a skilful, expressive and subtly subversive debut novel. It follows Erin, a student-turned-nanny, who has recently lost a dear friend, and returned from England to her home town of Belfast. There, she rekindles old friendships and romantic relationships, meets a mysterious American man, and tries to navigate a volatile relationship with her mother. As a coping mechanism for her grief, she finds herself visiting churches, confiding in Jesus. 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. Connolly is strong on friendship, intimacy, dysfunctional relationships, the transactional nature of casual sex, where each person is seeking something – relief, escape, distraction – from the other. The details of alcohol and drug-fuelled sessions are similarly vibrant. The milieu and thematic concerns call to mind Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperations and, particularly, Michael Magee’s Close To Home. (Connolly wrote an entertaining article on the tiresome inevitability of such comparisons earlier this year for the Guardian, a valiant attempt at reclaiming the narrative.)

However, the novel is about much more. Being a novel set in Belfast, there are many opportunities for it to reveal itself as a Troubles narrative in disguise, but Connolly steers clear of the pitfalls that so many other Northern Irish writers get trapped in. Being a ceasefire baby, her novel sees signs of the Troubles as pentimento through the city but refuses to allow them to take over her narrative. Crisp, clear-eyed and witty writing. . . . Rachel Connolly’s characters and their flawed, human attempts at redemption will stay with me for a long time.—Monica Heisey, author of Really Good, Actually Erin soon moves in with Anne-Marie, acting as a house cleaner and live-in childminder for her smallies. This isn't the life she wants, but it suits her for now. Her mornings spent running by the Lagan, and her nights spent drinking with her hometown friend Declan, an aspiring artist who works in her local pub.

This is a compelling and very moving novel about the aftermath of grief. Connolly captures the bewilderment, raw pain, and emotional paralysis of a young woman upended by loss. There is a quiet intensity – and an addictive quality – in the writing that slowly, cumulatively affects the reader. This is a marvellous evocation of the painful distance that exists between people and the eternal longing left in the wake of a lost loved one‘ There's an expectation that all novels coming out of the Northern Ireland are only about the 'Troubles’. It’s like a well-behaved high achiever’s view of what messiness is,” she says. “The things that are zoomed in on as ‘bad behaviour’ are just like, drinking and maybe doing a drug one time.” She laughs: “It’s treated as this huge, ‘Oh my God, her life is falling to bits’ moment, and like, is it?”

A narrative I’ve seen a lot is these men who sort of coldly use women,” says Connolly. “They’re calculating and shrewd, and then they’re on to the next person and you were a fool to ever fall for it. And that’s just not what I think people are like. […] I was interested in people trying to get something out of each other that the other person couldn’t necessarily give.” KG: There are several doubles of male characters in the book. Two sets of brothers, two Matts. Why did you want to emphasise masculinity in this way? KG: Erin is characterised as quite spiky as well as unemotional. Were you interested in creating a female heroine who is less ‘typical’? Lazy City is written in wry, sometimes repetitive prose, reflecting the level of Erin’s intoxication. The bar scenes are fun; each pub has its own ambience. We are given fleeting glimpses of other lives through various drunken encounters and “afters”. Connolly adds immediacy by writing dialogue in italics, tightly woven into the narration. In one passage the view from a flat is described with a cinematic attention to detail

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 Adrift, Erin spends her days hungover, and most nights drinking or taking drugs, blotting out life – either accompanied by her gay friend Declan, her “it’s complicated” lover Mikey, or Matt, an American who Erin meets at a bar, who’s in town teaching while trying to write a novel. The book is light on plot but heavy on relationships and messiness, and it's Erin's relationships (with those around her and with herself) that really make the book sing. Connolly was born in Belfast in 1993. She has written for the New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, the Guardian, and her fiction has been published in the Stinging Fly. She has also featured as a guest to discuss her work on "This American Life". Somehow both tightly controlled and highly spontaneous, Rachel Connolly's Lazy City is refreshingly open to the world. Frank, attentive, free of artifice or emotional contrivances, Connolly brings something new to any subject she shines her singular intelligence on’