It’s 2010. Rachel Murray is at university in Cork and working at a bookstore, thanks to global financial crisis that is squeezing her dentist parents, when she meets James Devlin, lower class and insistently heterosexual, who invites her to move in with him. The two of them develop a deep and caring friendship. When Rachel confides her crush on a professor, James helps her put together a book launch at the shop. But rather than Rachel connecting with her professor, it’s James who stumbles out of the closet. The resulting complications–of Rachel’s English degree, future in publishing, of the lives of her professor and his wife, of James and his dreams of writing comedy–will swirl in a direction that none of them could have foreseen.
Caroline O’Donoghue is a fantastic writer with an absolute gift for similes. (Sample: an Icelandic geyser is “Sea-World for the kind of people who read The New York Times on their phones”) Even when her characters lack compassion and insight for each other, her readers will ache for each of them trapped in impossible situations. She’s also brilliantly funny. The Rachel Incident is the best book I’ve read in ages and I enjoyed it immensely. Highly recommended.