The Lesser Bohemians: A Novel

by Eimear McBride

Overview

A breathtaking award-winning novel about an extraordinary, all-consuming love affair
 
One night an eighteen-year-old Irish girl, recently arrived in London to attend drama school, meets an older man—a well-regarded actor in his own right. While she is naive and thrilled by life in the big city, he is haunted by more than a few demons, and the clamorous relationship that ensues risks undoing them both.
 
A captivating story of passion and innocence, joy and discovery set against the vibrant atmosphere of 1990s London over the course of a single year, The Lesser Bohemians glows with the eddies and anxieties of growing up, and the transformative intensity of a powerful new love.

Winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction
Shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award
Shortlisted for the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize 
Shortlisted for the 2016 Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards Eason Novel of the Year

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101903506
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/15/2017
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	368,202
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Eimear McBride was born in 1976 and grew up in Ireland. She currently lives in Norwich with her family. The Lesser Bohemians is her second novel.

Read an Excerpt

THE AUDITION
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Lesser Bohemians"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Eimear McBride.
Excerpted by permission of Crown/Archetype.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

Praise for THE LESSER BOHEMIANS

"[A] propulsive coming-of-age story... imbued with a captivating sense of youthful excitement and vulnerability."
—The New Yorker

“The confidence and the capacity are as good as anyone’s…there’s an openness, an inclusivity, a distinct lack of God-almightyness, that makes reading [McBride] such a pleasure.”
—Jeannette Winterson, New York Times Book Review

“The Lesser Bohemians” is every bit as stylistically resourceful as “Girl,” every bit as urgent and authentic. It is also more well-rounded, better. The narrative voice will be recognizable to readers of the earlier novel, capturing a snapshot of thought at the moment before grammar constrains it, what the author has referred to as a “stream of pre-consciousness.” The word order is once again scrambled to ingenious (and poetic) effect, clauses pared down to their impressionistic essences…For a second time, Ms. McBride has channeled the mental life of a narrator with an intensity, a lack of mediation, that few authors can achieve. “The Lesser Bohemians” is a full-on sensory experience—and another superlative achievement.”
—Wall Street Journal
 
“Spellbinding…[H]er stunning second novel shows that she has not only acquired fresh surfaces to work on, she has also developed exciting new brush strokes…McBride’s prose sings…The Lesser Bohemians recalls Samuel Beckett and Henry Miller. Ultimately, though, it is a fiercely original work, an extraordinary novel crafted by a fearless modern writer.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
 
“The Lesser Bohemians is a love story, yes, but it is really an electric and beautiful account of how the walls of self shift and buckle and are rebuilt.”
—NPR.org
 
 “Joycean…The novel is filled with intricate, imaginative wordplay…crafted by one of the most admired young talents in fiction.” 
—Scott Simon, NPR
 
“[A] powerful novel about desire.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine
 
“Not often does a novel so expertly seduce its readers into an alternate state of consciousness that it mimics an actual dream state, where everything solid is hazily just beyond reach. Eimear McBride, with her deployment of modernist technique reminiscent of James Joyce, elicits such a mental state throughout her new novel, The Lesser Bohemians ― really,
it’s the only way to read it.”
—Huffington Post
 
“This is above all, a love story: bare, achingly romantic, and crushingly felt.”
—Booklist, starred review

From the Publisher

07/04/2016
McBride’s second novel is more ambitious than her acclaimed debut, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, and it retains the uncompromisingly Joycean brogue and diary-like intimations of adolescence that made that first novel such a success. Set between 1994 and 1995, it follows 18-year-old Eily, a boozy ingénue, as she leaves her native Ireland to attend drama school in London. There, caught in whirl of excess and the shadow of IRA terrorism, she is mostly assigned stereotypically Irish bit parts, but finds herself captivated by a much older actor named Stephen, an ex-junkie estranged from his family and young daughter. Initially meeting without names, they embark on a tempestuous relationship that reveals the worst in both while offering Stephen a chance at redemption and Eily a future. But the real focus is McBride’s stream-of-consciousness prose, in which drinking is rendered as “pints turning telescope,” “the lightless hall sings sanctuary from the frenzy” of a violent encounter, and a night of youthful debauchery leaves the revelers with “Satan under every skin. Skinful under all our skin.” The story (especially when Stephen’s backstory hijacks the narrative) isn’t full enough to sustain McBride’s style, which comes to seem less and less an accurate shorthand for first love. Still, this sophomore effort is striking enough to continue McBride’s forging of a daring career. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

04/15/2016
Having won multiple honors (e.g., the Baileys Women's Prize) for her brilliant and coruscating first novel, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, McBride returns with the story of a naïve 18-year-old Irish lass studying acting in mid-1990s London. Naturally, she launches an affair with an established actor 20 years her senior. With a 75,000-copy first printing.

Library Journal

2016-07-04
The follow-up to A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (2014), the author’s groundbreaking, award-winning debut novel.It’s 1994 in London, and McBride’s narrator, 18-year-old Eily, arrives from Ireland to begin drama school. Wide-eyed and awed by the city and all its cacophonous activity, she soon meets an older actor in a bar (reading “his Penguin Dostoyevsky”) and embarks on a torrid—and increasingly tumultuous—love affair with him. Though he's 20 years her senior, it’s clear that he doesn’t necessarily have it all figured out; as the narrative progresses, we learn more about his skeleton-filled closet, details that help partially explain his erratic behavior. Most of the novel consists of Eily’s pulsing, fractured thoughts concerning her psychosexual awakening, though her lover’s lengthy disclosure of his past demons throws the narrative somewhat off-balance. Many of the trademarks of McBride’s first novel are present here—intense first-person interiority (details about the narrator’s surroundings are largely absent; for the majority of the book, readers are inside the occasionally claustrophobic confines of Eily’s head); halting, Joycean sentence construction; passionate, urgent descriptions of conflicting emotions—and fans should enjoy this one. However, it’s not likely to win the author many new readers. While A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing masterfully captured the narrator’s mental and emotional states across a range of ages, Eily remains stagnant in her obsessive pursuit of her addictive new love, and the novel runs about 50 pages too long. Still, the author is a confident stylist and produces enough dazzling sentences to keep the pages turning—e.g., describing a scene in which Eily and others snort cocaine, McBride writes, “ponytails like tidal waves slap tabletops and nostrils butterfly.”A unique, mostly engaging work from a talented writer who will hopefully take another step forward in her next novel.

Kirkus Reviews