The Lesser Bohemians: A Novel

"Eily is 18, Irish, just barely removed from the “dun school skirts” of early life. She arrives in London — alive with “traffic all gadding in the midday shine” and “pigeons at infernal coo” — to audition for drama school. Eily’s live, wriggling words construe themselves without the pens of grammar. She often inverts the verb and subject (walk I) which gives a kind of precarious immediacy to her sentences, like grammar can’t stand up straight under the weight of the narrator’s wild wants. The result is a stunning modernist novel."