Lazy City: A Novel

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A] perceptive debut… Connolly draws the reader along by making each well-honed scene reverberate with emotion. This thoughtful character portrait is worth a look.—Publishers Weekly

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.

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Somehow both tightly controlled and highly spontaneous, Rachel Connolly's Lazy City is refreshingly open to the world. Frank, attentive, free of artifice or emotional contrivances, Connolly brings something new to any subject she shines her singular intelligence on’ Crisp, clear-eyed and witty writing. . . . Rachel Connolly’s characters and their flawed, human attempts at redemption will stay with me for a long time.—Monica Heisey, author of Really Good, Actually KG: With the church, which offers Erin a place of safety, you also emphasise the way that Erin doesn’t really have a proper home and the context of the current housing crisis. The novel opens with an atmospheric “pink and hazy purple” sky. References to the drama of the sky recur throughout, calling to mind the iconic sky in Anna Burns’ Milkman.

A narrative I’ve seen a lot is these men who sort of coldly use women,” says Connolly. “They’re calculating and shrewd, and then they’re on to the next person and you were a fool to ever fall for it. And that’s just not what I think people are like. […] I was interested in people trying to get something out of each other that the other person couldn’t necessarily give.” It’s really books about a specific way of being a young woman. And there’s still a lot of misogyny, and not taking your work very seriously, or thinking that your book is a fun project.”

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. It's probably a bit of cliche (and somewhat lazy - to borrow a word from the title of this book) to call Lazy City the female reply to Close to Home by Michael Magee, but with both being debut coming-of-age novels set in Belfast by young Northern Irish writers, the comparison is inevitable. Not to mention that there's a similar somnambulant vibe to both books - young characters growing up a post-conflict Belfast, struggling to find their way, their drug-fuelled nights and hungover days moving sluggishly along. One feels like the counterpoint to the other, though I'll admit I enjoyed this book more. Clear-eyed prose, realistic relationships and dry, sharp observational humour combine to make this a compelling read. Few writers capture the human condition and what drives social behaviour with the elegance, clarity and restraint that Rachel Connolly does. Funny, intelligent and dynamic, Lazy City paints a beautiful modern portrait of Belfast and the complex, self-imploding characters who navigate it. It shows how individuals attempt to find meaning and direction in the world, small cities and each other’s lives’