The author speaks to Holly Connolly about his debut book Reward System: a collection of six stories that explore technology and the way that it shapes contemporary life
Holly Connolly provides a not-that-festive list of book recommendations, featuring highlights from the past year and works from two writers who’ve recently left us
It is not easy to describe
Acts of Desperation
,
Megan Nolan’s brilliant and much-anticipated debut novel. I have seen it billed variously as a love story, an anti-love story, a millennial novel, a novel about being young, about addictive, destructive behaviour and about abuse. But like the essays and criticism for
New Statesman, Observer and The New York Times for which Nolan has already gained a following, this is a story handled with a nuance that evades easy categorisation.
Told in first-person, with the main narrative interspersed with reflections from a later-day Athens, it’s a compulsive novel, like watching something burn. Early on the unnamed narrator meets Ciaran, who is beautiful, but also distant, with a propensity for capricious cruelty. After a brief breakup (he reunites with his ex-girlfriend), they move in quickly and her world contracts. What follows is a deft exploration of power, coercion and passivity, propelled by the narrator’s own concentrated