finished reading

I’ll preface this with a proclamation: I love all things Ireland. To find a novel set in my beloved Cork is delightful. Narrated by Rachel in the 2020s, married to James Carey, pregnant, and a noted writer, the story is both a funny and poignant look back at the pivotal years of 2009 and 2010.   

Rachel grows from a sheltered, middle-class girl into a "bohemian-wannabe" navigating an intense college year where the job market is impossible, and the world feels bleak. However, the real engine of the story is her all-consuming friendship with James Devlin, her gay best friend and bookstore colleague. Their lives become so intertwined as they share a run-down house on Shandon Street that Rachel’s own identity often feels completely bent around his path.   

The drama truly ignites when their lives collide with Dr. Fred Byrne, Rachel’s married professor. What begins as a student’s crush on Fred spirals into a chaotic web of secrets and romantic entanglements that force Rachel to determine her future career and her sense of self.

From the publisher:

A brilliantly funny novel about friends, lovers, Ireland in chaos, and a young woman desperately trying to manage all three

Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it’s love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them.

When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred’s glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife. Aching with unrequited love, shot through with delicious, sparkling humor, The Rachel Incident is a triumph.