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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
1 March 2021 • 12:01am
A hairdresser at work in Vienna, but April 12 is the earliest salons may open in England
Credit: LISI NIESNER/REUTERS
SIR – We are concerned that the fiscal impact of the Government’s lockdown measures on women is being overlooked.
The virus has taken its toll on a great many people in Britain, but a significant number of female employers, entrepreneurs and employees are being affected – and the damage could take decades to repair.
More women than men work in sectors that have shut down. Mothers are almost 50 per cent more likely than fathers to have lost their jobs or been forced to leave because school closures have created a childcare crisis.