So the idea of a rivalry didn’t make much sense to me. And then I read Close to Home and it was wonderful, absolutely wonderful, and I wanted to be friends with Michael Magee. Rachel Connolly is a bright new star in fiction. Connolly’s beautifully drawn portrait of modem Belfast is fresh and quietly subversive and her prose is incisive and sharp. A must read’ The book certainly adheres to some of the post-Rooney hallmarks of modern fiction. It is certainly not a plot-driven novel nor are all of the characters gripping or developed. But the book more than makes up for it with the exploration of Erin's introspection and sanctuary as her life shifts after Kate's death and she is reintroduced to old relationships. I did find the casual recreational drug use even within the rural community quite eye opening it was more how I expected life for city teenagers to be.

Canongate has snapped up Lazy City, a coming-of-age novel exploring the aftermath of death, by debut author Rachel Connolly. There is the sense that Connolly hasn’t yet mastered the novelistic skill of filtering: “I’m thirsty as well as nauseous, maybe still tired too. I can’t tell past the nausea … [A hangover is muted] thanks to the coffee or the painkillers.” Mundane passages on ironing, eye make-up, the cyclical fashions of jeans, Mass times, compound the problem. Good fiction needs ordinary detail to contrast the dynamic, but the balance here is a little off. Rachel Connolly: It’s an odd question, because Belfast is a place where a lot of young people have to leave for work or university. I’ve lived in London for five or six years, and I lived in Belfast longer than I’ve lived anywhere else. Louise Kennedy, who wrote Trespasses, left Belfast when she was eight or nine and set her novels during the Troubles – so closer to what people expect of books from Belfast – I don’t know if she’d be asked the same. It’s a place people do leave and that’s really inherent to the relationship people have with it. But it’s somewhere with a distinctive politics, history and geography so it’s not surprising to me that people who move away end up setting stuff there. This restless, big-hearted, accomplished novel examines the delicate, elaborate fabric of communication after grief. In a voice that is skirting, comic and attentive, Lazy City embodies the traits I admire in Rachel Connolly's writing: its charisma, nervous energy and verve’ RC: I wanted two Matts because I thought that was funny. And to point out how, in a way, Erin’s relationship with Matt is far more intimate than her relationship with the American Matt, even though they’re sleeping with one another. With [Irish] Matt, he’s quite privileged, and that was a character I was interested in making sympathetic. He’s one of the only characters who looks after others, for example. For a while, we’ve had this reductive pop feminist discourse of ‘men are trash’ and I’m interested in men who don’t have as much power as we like to think. Matt is a character who doesn’t find life easy and it’s nobody’s fault. I was interested in what to do with a character like that.The elements are set, and what follows is sometimes predictable, as Erin pinballs between men, engages in circular conversations as everyone gets blasted on coke and ketamine, and goes through labyrinthine application processes for dead-end jobs. But there are many pleasures. Connolly gives Erin a dry, wry voice, and one that’s frequently very funny: “Some men start talking about their dads, or worse, their mums,” she observes of the pre-sex verbal dance. Erin thinks as she talks, and opens up the reader’s thinking as well. “How is it that I can describe this pattern so clearly but still be caught inside it?” she wonders. Elsewhere, she baulks at her peers’ perpetual ramblings on politics: “What if the problem is much deeper than capitalism? If the problem is human nature, what do we do then?” Excels in its measured and realistic portrait of grief but struggles to develop into a propulsive narrative.

To the American, who longs to understand the place, it’s impenetrable. And to Erin and her contemporaries, who know Belfast in their bones, it can be just as opaque, since the shadow of the Troubles looms, but never touched their lives. RC: I don’t think I could write a book that wasn’t funny in places. I know it’s the trend at the minute for books to be really dire, with a very mute or numb narrator who seems to have a joyless life. But that’s not what I like. Humour and fun are such an important part of life. Sometimes you read a book that’s very serious and grave and you meet the writer and that’s not what they’re like at all. I wonder if maybe they’ve written in this way out of a perception that it’s a writerly way to write.And the reality is that we all share a bigger, common enemy: a world in which people broadly just don’t buy books (or if they do, they’re books with titles like “My Story: One YouTuber’s Rise to The Top”) and an industry which is generally not good at supporting people doing genuinely good or interesting work. 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‘ 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.

KG: You have all these sequences where Erin goes into churches to think. I love how you describe Erin’s ambivalent relationship with Catholicism, its ‘cheap luxuriousness.’ It reflects the way a lot of people who grew up with a religion feel. If I have a criticism, it’s that there are some repetitive conversations. I enjoyed Erin’s frequent trips to the Church (Catholic of course) where she went to contemplate. Her descriptions of the icons, such as baby Jesus, and all the crosses…the different depictions of Jesus were interesting. Her contemplations on God and the Church were intriguing. This is where Connolly shines, in Erin’s scenes in the different churches. As much as it stages an actual grief, Lazy City explores less immediate forms of mourning. With the looming threat of climate destruction, automated job rejections and depressing new-build flats, this is a Belfast delicately poised between past, present and future, symbolised in granular descriptions of its marbled skies. Far from idle, Connolly captures Erin’s world with her signature precision that never quite allows a word or idea to rest. 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?” My feeling is that if you can do even a small amount to change this then you probably should. To this end, I often even find myself effectively doing PR for, not even friends’ books, but books that have nothing to do with me. I went a bit mad about one extraordinary novel which was out last year, Pure Life by Eugene Marten (which I would really like you to buy), and in my view wasn’t getting enough attention. I posted about it so much on social media that one friend asked: “What’s the deal with you and that Eugene guy then, were you seeing him at some point or what?”The debut novel from Rachel Connolly , a London-based writer from Belfast, Lazy City stages Erin’s return to her hometown after the sudden death of her best friend. As a live-in au pair, both her home and work are a temporary arrangement as she ambivalently decides how to move forward: “This feeling of trying to plan around many variables, and the ways I might possibly feel, is like plotting a course along a shifting surface.” In her social life, Erin struggles to feel connected, sensing others at a slight remove, whether it’s her ex-boyfriend Mikey or her old friend Declan. At Madame George, the bar where Declan works, she meets an attractive American called Matt and they start an unlikely relationship. “The loneliness in him means something to the loneliness in me,” thinks Erin. 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. Absolutely LOVED IT. A coming of age novel set in Belfast and delivered in the most beautifully clear and engaging prose’ KG: You have a very analytical writing style, present in your non-fiction work too, with all these logical exercises where Erin weighs up the motives and actions of other people. I’d be interested to hear more about your literary influences. I am so thrilled to be working with Francis, who understands this book so well," she said. "And always grateful to my agent Tracy, for seeing what I was trying to do in my fiction from an early stage.”

This soul-searching – and at times delightfully spiky – debut is a clear-eyed, non-judgemental guide through the sad stasis of grief and what’s both lost and gained in taking those vital steps closer to moving on.—Marie Claire, “Best Books of 2023” 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 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.)

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A poignant story set in Northern Ireland, Rachel Connolly’s Lazy City is a mesmerising debut.—Rhianon Holley, Buzz Magazine