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Title details for The Rachel Incident by Caroline O'Donoghue - Available

The Rachel Incident

A novel

by Caroline O'Donoghue
Tara Flynn
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
1 of 1 copy available
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A USA TODAY BESTSELLER • A brilliantly funny novel about friends, lovers, Ireland in chaos, and a young woman desperately trying to manage all three • “O'Donoghue deepens the familiar coming-of-age premise with riveting moral complications." —People
"If you’ve ever been unsure what to do with your degree in English; if you’ve ever wondered when the rug-buying part of your life will start...if you’ve ever loved the wrong person, or the right person at the wrong time…In short, if you’ve ever been young, you will love The Rachel Incident like I did.” —Gabrielle Zevin, New York Times best-selling author of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    June 27, 2023

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780593741887
      • File size: 269906 KB
      • Duration: 09:22:18

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 24, 2023
      Two 20-something roommates become enmeshed with an older married couple in this smart and colorful outing from O’Donoghue (Promising Young Women). It’s 2009, and James Devlin, a Christmas temp at O’Conner Books in Cork, Ireland, initially clashes with his bookseller colleague Rachel Murray due to their class differences—Rachel is from a family of cosmetic dentists and bankers while James is from rough-and-tumble Manchester—though they soon become friends and rent a cottage together. After Rachel invites her former university professor Fred Byrne to give a reading at the store, his arrival with Deenie, his wife and publisher, adds intrigue, beginning with James encouraging Rachel to seduce Fred, Rachel entering a fraught friendship with Deenie, and James processing his on-and-off relationship with an emotionally unavailable man by writing a TV script. Along the way, there’s a pregnancy and a plan for an abortion. In addition to the interpersonal drama, O’Donoghue pulls no punches in her depiction of the abortion crisis in Ireland during the period, showing how women either traveled abroad or resorted to illegal and potentially dangerous methods to terminate pregnancies. Key to it all is O’Donoghue’s spot-on portrayal of Rachel’s youthful yearning (“I was twenty and I needed two things: to be in love and to be taken seriously”). In O’Donoghue’s world, there’s plenty to fall in love with. Agent: Bryony Woods, Diamond Kahn & Woods.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Tara Flynn takes listeners to Ireland, where they meet the awkward yet lovable Rachel Murray. The novel starts in the year 2022 but is mostly told in a flashback starting with the year 2010 and progressing forward. Rachel reminisces about her life in her 20s, when she was juggling her newfound friendship with roommate James Devlin and her crush on her married college professor, Dr. Fred Byrne. That crush would change the trio's futures. Flynn portrays Rachel's wit, vulnerabilities, and passions with fervor and poise. Her soothing Irish lilt is enjoyable and will have listeners hanging on every word as they discover how the titular "incident" will forever transform the main characters' lives. J.J.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
    • Library Journal

      June 10, 2024

      O'Donoghue's (Promising Young Women) latest takes listeners to 2010 Cork, Ireland, where university student Rachel Murray and her bookstore coworker, James Devlin, become fast friends and decide to rent a flat together. Rachel has a huge crush on her handsome married English professor, Fred Byrne, but then she finds out that he is attracted to James instead. She soon becomes involved with a different James--James Carey--who doesn't seem ready for a real commitment. When he leaves school to care for his ailing parents, she loses hope for the future of their relationship, but by then, troubles of a different sort come to pass. Rachel and James navigate 2010s Ireland, trying to make ends meet amid a recession and juggling their increasingly complicated romantic entanglements. Narrator Tara Flynn offers an engaging performance, capturing the liveliness of Rachel and her friends while conveying their stress as they work through questions about sexuality, financial woes, and debates about reproductive rights. Flynn provides wonderful character voices and employs a variety of accents to make the story come alive. VERDICT O'Donoghue's complex coming-of-age story captures the fun, messiness, and unpredictability of youth. A winner for fans of Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends.--Joanna M. Burkhardt

      Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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