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About the Book

About the Book

The Rachel Incident

A brilliantly funny novel about friends, lovers, Ireland in chaos and a young woman desperately trying to manage all three.

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.

Audiobook available, read by Tara Flynn

The Rachel Incident
by Caroline O'Donoghue

  • Publication Date: May 28, 2024
  • Genres: Fiction
  • Paperback: 304 pages
  • Publisher: Vintage
  • ISBN-10: 0593469445
  • ISBN-13: 9780593469446