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The Mess We're In: A vivid story of friendship, hedonism and finding your own rhythm

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I'm a voice in the noise. I'm ready. It's the turn of the millennium and, landing in London with nothing but her CD collection and demo tape, Orla Quinn moves into a squalid Kilburn house with her best mate and a band called Shiva. Orla wants to make music, but juggling two jobs and partying every night isn't helping.

So vivid . . . What [Macmanus has] managed to do with London, and what London means to different generations of Irish people, is terrific, and deeply moving’ RODDY DOYLE The story (such as it is) follows Orla who has come to London via Cheltenham to live with her best friend, Neema and the members of Neema's brother's band "Shiva". Orla has her own ambitions to write, sing and produce her own music but she finds out fast that there's no easy route to that happening. When everyone’s gone from the pub, Pat lets her tiredness take her over, her mouth sagging downwards into an upside down U. A very astute overview of problems with our political systems in the present day. Not just in Australia, but in other major allies as well (the UK and USA) It describes how greed has overtaken humanity. How people are losing confidence in the people they chose to represent them. After moving to Cheltneham via Dublin for uni, Orla is ready to take on the big smoke and moves in with an up and coming band, Shiva in Kilburn. (Or County Kilburn if you will 😂). Orla juggles trying to achieve a career within music for herself all while balancing two jobs and a headonistic lifestyle.Terrified about the current volatile state of the western world? Anxiety levels high? Concerned about what is happening (or, for that matter, not happening) to our politics, society, culture? Then perhaps this book is ideal for you… Men are unfortunately the undoing of Neema and Orla’s close friendship. As Orla experiences and experiments with sexual freedom (Moses, Vinnie etc) Neema struggles with watching her friend be so free when she is having to live under such conservative boundaries depicted by her Indian family. And also, Orla is really really messy, which drives Neema crazy. While Orla’s own dreams seem to be going nowhere, Shiva are on the brink of something big. But as the hype around the band intensifies, so does the hedonism, and relationships in the house are growing strained. I perhaps need a bit more time to digest this book and all that it made me feel. The things I really loved was the authenticity of life as a 20-something just out of college in the year 2001, I was just a year younger than the character at this time and it made me reminisce so much about the music/gig scene and political feelings of the time. Although Orla is nothing like me, I felt I understood where she was coming from and in particular her relationships with her family. The correlation with Orla's Da and what I also experienced in my mid-20s was very well written and I felt all the emotions in my core. Annie McManus writes beautifully with such description and I truly enjoyed absorbing every word lyrically.

I'm so sad it's over. I could have read another sixty chapters . . . A fantastic read' JOANNE MCNALLY The Mess We’re In by Annie Macmanus published May 11th with Wildfire and is described by Sara Cox as ‘beautifully painted, well set up and realistic’. It’s 2000, and she makes the more with her best friend Neema who she met at uni in Cheltenham. Neema’s brother Kesh is in a band - Shiva, along with Richie and Frank, and they have a spare room that Neema and Orla can move into. Orla makes a few poor and impulsive decision along the way, but hey didn’t we all in our early 20’s?Totally captures the highs and lows, emotional and personal costs associated with those aspiring to be part of the tough world that is the music business’ COSEY FANNI TUTTI At the end of the book Keane offers ten apparently sensible suggestions for countering these negative drives, which are intended to help us see through what might otherwise seem to be insurmountable impasses. Whether one agrees with them or not, they will at least offer some hope that all is not quite lost. I just finished listening to this. Firstly, I loved the fact that Annie Mac read this. She has such a nice voice and clearly had a vision for how she wanted the story to get across. Macmanus does a good job of giving us the little details so familiar to Irish people living at home and abroad: the chats with the other ex-pats in the local Irish pub; the maudlin ramblings after drink of how difficult life is/was; the phone calls home where guilt is laid on, however inadvertently. Orla gets caught up in a merry-go-round of being glad to be away from home so she can flourish in a way she believes she couldn’t in Ireland, but then not being able to get away from home in a spiritual sense—the elderly gentlemen in the pub reminding her of what it has to move abroad, her family issues haunting her despite the miles and Irish sea between them, and the nagging feeling that her new life isn’t all that different to what it might have been had she stayed at home – she hasn’t had the expected metamorphosis into a young, hip Londoner quite yet. Published May 2023, The Mess We're In is the second book from Sunday Times Bestselling author Annie Macmanus.

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