We also hear from Carmel’s late mother, Rose, who looked after Lucy in light of Carmel’s indifference; her hermetic and rageful father, John, who had been abandoned by his first wife; and her alcoholic half-brother, Richie. “Who would care about a family like theirs?” Carmel wonders as the police embark on their investigation. “Theirs were ordinary human failings, tragedies too routine to be of note.” The author dives into some complex themes: childhood trauma, alcoholism, teenage pregnancy, self-sabotage, sociopathic ambition, and more. She prises them open carefully, thoughtfully and without judgement. With topics like these, it's no surprise that this is a sad book, but it carries within it a thread of hope which is unbroken to the end. I absolutely Megan Nolan's last book, Acts of Desperation, which was one of my books of the year 2021. State of the nation novel was the original intent. . Jonathan Coe What a Carve Up was an influence.

I was talking with a friend lately about an impulse many writers have, not least myself, to finish pieces like this one with some ill-earned flourish of moral clarity. “All articles,” I said, “end in one of two ways: ‘And at the end of the day, who cares?’ or ‘At the end of the day, love is what matters.’” I am trying to resist that impulse. I am trying to avoid casting my indecision about what constitutes happiness as its own kind of moral victory. I am not going to smugly advise that the key to happiness lies in accepting its transience. 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 We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview. Ordinary Human Failings is a novel about an Irish family and their lives uncovered as one of them is accused of killing a small girl on a London estate. In 1990, tabloid journalist Tom Hargreaves is investigating the disappearance of a young girl who then turns up dead, and the finger of blame is pointed at Lucy, who lives with her Irish immigrant family: her aloof mother Carmel, alcoholic uncle, and reclusive grandfather. As he gets closer to the family, he tries to unravel their stories into something resembling a news story, but that might not be the way it is going. The subject matter is tough and none of it is exactly a bundle of laughs. Megan Nolan doesn’t go in for fairy story endings for either her characters or the novel itself. The main theme of the book was well conveyed, and it is that devoting love, and time, to a child does not come easily to everybody.Ordinary Human Failings is a third person narrative about an ordinary family damaged by a series of very mundane, personal tragedies. The same quality of writing is there but this is a very different, more mature type of book to Acts of Desperation. Carmel is very much at the centre of the book, mother of Lucy and the reason why the family moved from Waterford to London in the first place. Richie is her half brother, who struggles with drink and finding a direction in life. Her father is John, distant and troubled by events in his own past. Mother Rose is the glue holding the family together. There is redemption though for some characters (not all) and it’s of a believable and measured sort.

What an unexpected sophomore novel from Megan Nolan. From the deeply personal, visceral, can’t-look-away-but-can’t-stop-reading Acts of Desperation, to this quiet, claustrophobic but compelling book. When a child goes missing on a London estate in 1990, the finger of blame is pointed by residents at Lucy, the young child of a reclusive Irish immigrant family. Tabloid journalist Tom Hargreaves happens upon the scene and attempts to turn it to his advantage by exploiting the family for his own journalistic gain.In the summer of 2022, when life returned to something resembling its former self, my notion of contentment as an equivalent to happiness was pierced dramatically. As the world expanded again, so did my ideas about pleasure and meaning. For the first time in my life, I had real choices about how I wanted to live (an unspeakably privileged problem to complain about), and I struggled to understand whether happiness for me means stimulation and excitement or comfort and calm. For some people these things are not mutually exclusive, but for me they seem to be. It has always been one or the other, and now I have to choose. Killer children. From MN’s research, the absence of emotionally warm home life is a leading causation. Unwanted nature of a pregnancy is often the reason for the mother’s disconnect from the child. The secret is we’re a family, we’re just an ordinary family, with ordinary unhappiness like yours…..there is no secret Tom, or else there are hundreds of them, and none of them interesting enough for you.’

Growing up on an “estate”(a term often suppressed these days because of negative connotations); unwanted pregnancy and the constraints on freedom to decide in Ireland; mental health. Nolan speaks from the heart. The journalism, and focus on minors committing the most awful crimes is a subject that fascinated Nolan, and is given real tabloid newspaper authenticity by her own experiences in a paper in London.Ordinary Human Failings is a better novel in my opinion, but I would be lying to say that the work was not identifiable as that of the author of Acts of Desperation. The character that I most enjoyed is Richie. It’s not easy to write a character who has been so totally overwhelmed by alcohol dependency, and retain some reader empathy. Nolan manages to do this. His primary fear is of loneliness and isolation: Sarebbe bastato soffermarsi sul titolo per comprendere il nucleo di quello che, a tutti gli effetti, è un romanzo familiare camuffato da thriller. I’m sure I’m not alone in being slightly anxious that the story was going to be taken up with the death of a young child, but the story doesn’t go down that road. Rather, it’s a book about the secrets that people carry around with them, the private suffering hidden just below the surface. Carmel We get the POV of Carmel (Lucy’s mother), Richie (Carmel’s brother) and Tom (Carmel’s father) as they pull apart the threads of their lives that brought the family to this point, from their origins in Waterford. This is a family story but also a commentary on social inequality and how the smallest of events can can tip an ordinary family into decline out of which it becomes nigh on impossible to claw.