Recommendations from our site
“Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan is a novel that handles trauma with honesty and care. There is no sugar-coating with virtue or easy beauty here. This is a story that employs a cleanly cinematic gaze to observe the plain disintegration of a family through a pattern of social circumstance, addiction and prejudice, egged on by the ruthlessness of 90s tabloid journalism – to give us a portrayal of a society both fractured and hopeful” Read more...
The Best Political Novels of 2024: The Orwell Prize for Fiction
“Ordinary Human Failings is a family drama set on a London housing estate in the 1990s, as an Irish immigrant family falls under suspicion following the disappearance of a local toddler. An ambitious but jaded reporter offers to put the family up in a cheap hotel—for ‘protection’—but this apparent munificence comes with strings attached. Nolan has been one of my favourite writers for years; she dissects and labels emotion and the inner experience with a scalpel blade. Ordinary Human Failings feels like a significant development in her personal style, shifting from the hushed confessional to something grander, something more universal.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
