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The City Changes Its Face
A MUST-READ NOVEL OF 2025 IN THE GUARDIAN,
FINANCIAL TIMES
,
IRISH TIMES,
SUNDAY TIMES,
STYLIST, AND MANY OTHERS
'One of the finest writers at work today.' ANNE ENRIGHT
'McBride is a cartographer of the secret self, guiding us towards hidden treasure.' CLAIRE KILROY
'Eimear McBride does extraordinary things with language . . . she breaks every rule in the grammar book and gleefully gets away with it.'GUARDIAN
'A typical McBride work. Praise doesn't come much higher.'FINANCIAL TIMES
So, all would be grand then, as far as the eye could see. Which it was, for a while. Up until the city, remembering its knives and forks, invited itself in to dine.
It's 1995. Outside their grimy window, the city rushes by. But in the flat there is only Stephen and Eily. Their bodies, the tangled sheets. Unpacked boxes stacked in the kitchen and the total obsession of new love.
Eighteen months later, the flat feels different. Love is merging with reality. Stephen's teenage daughter has re-appeared, while Eily has made a choice, the consequences of which she cannot outrun. Now they face a reckoning for all that's been left unspoken - emotions, secrets and ambitions. Tonight, if they are to find one another again, what must be said aloud?
Love rallies against life. Time tells truths. The city changes its face.
'One of the finest writers at work today.' ANNE ENRIGHT
'McBride is a cartographer of the secret self, guiding us towards hidden treasure.' CLAIRE KILROY
'Eimear McBride does extraordinary things with language . . . she breaks every rule in the grammar book and gleefully gets away with it.'GUARDIAN
'A typical McBride work. Praise doesn't come much higher.'FINANCIAL TIMES
So, all would be grand then, as far as the eye could see. Which it was, for a while. Up until the city, remembering its knives and forks, invited itself in to dine.
It's 1995. Outside their grimy window, the city rushes by. But in the flat there is only Stephen and Eily. Their bodies, the tangled sheets. Unpacked boxes stacked in the kitchen and the total obsession of new love.
Eighteen months later, the flat feels different. Love is merging with reality. Stephen's teenage daughter has re-appeared, while Eily has made a choice, the consequences of which she cannot outrun. Now they face a reckoning for all that's been left unspoken - emotions, secrets and ambitions. Tonight, if they are to find one another again, what must be said aloud?
Love rallies against life. Time tells truths. The city changes its face.
346 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 11, 2025
65 people are currently reading
9470 people want to read
About the author
Eimear McBride
20 books728 followersEimear McBride was born in Liverpool in 1976 to Irish parents. The family moved back to Ireland when she was three. She spent her childhood in Sligo and Mayo. Then, at the age of 17, she moved to London.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 118 reviews
December 13, 2025
i am once again accidentally reading a semi-sequel to a book i have not read.
https://emmareadstoomuch.substack.com...
the fact that this was such a confusing experience could in most cases be chalked up to that, or if not that alone then the unique style of this, but i don't think that's it.
i did really enjoy the likely polarizing writing at first, and parts of this unbelievably toxic love story, but its abrupt and almost inexplicable devolving into a screenplay for a bajillion pages took out most of the grace i was giving its weirdness.
but all of my opinions should be taken with a grain of salt.
typically and especially on this one.
bottom line: in my defense it does not have that fun little goodreads series tag or anything.
(thanks to the publisher for the copy)
https://emmareadstoomuch.substack.com...
the fact that this was such a confusing experience could in most cases be chalked up to that, or if not that alone then the unique style of this, but i don't think that's it.
i did really enjoy the likely polarizing writing at first, and parts of this unbelievably toxic love story, but its abrupt and almost inexplicable devolving into a screenplay for a bajillion pages took out most of the grace i was giving its weirdness.
but all of my opinions should be taken with a grain of salt.
typically and especially on this one.
bottom line: in my defense it does not have that fun little goodreads series tag or anything.
(thanks to the publisher for the copy)
Read
March 12, 2025As I was reading this book, my mind roamed over some of the literary characters I've met who might be described as 'unhinged'. Not that there are technically any 'unhinged' characters in Eimear McBride's book but that's where my mind went anyway.
I thought of King Lear, whose dilemmas overwhelm him until his reason snaps. And I thought of Hamlet too, betimes mad, betimes super sane, and maybe actually neither?
And then I thought of Sylvia Plath's Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar, 'stewing in her own sour air' until she can't take it anymore.
Emer McBride's main character, a young drama student called Eily, has elements of all these characters in her make-up. She's like King Lear in the way she is overcome by conflicting feelings that prevent her seeing her way out of her dilemmas so that she drives herself "halfway to Bedlam in a blink–and not the new one, the original down by Liverpool Street, thronging with the stark staring mad. Even when I am searching for OFF, it’s an elusive thing–a feeling-around-in-the-dark type of switch, which I have no true talent for. I’m more wind up and keep winding, right the way to snap!"
And she's like Hamlet too, sometimes talking in riddles, sometimes incredibly astute.
But Esther Greenwood is perhaps the character she most resembles. They are both nineteen, both on the cusp of their lives and both suddenly terrified of being shunted into something that will stifle them. In fact they are both the embodiment of the image Eily sees reflected back at her from the window of her flat above the teeming London streets: yet another young woman who is lost in herself.
Because drama student Eily feels trapped by a future where she will always and only be offered roles that fit the image of the 'lost young woman'. The irony is that her mental disintegration (though less severe than Esther Greenwood's) means that she becomes 'lost in herself' to quite a brutal extent, and stews for a long while in 'her own sour air'. And not unlike Esther, the act of creating something out of words eventually provides a solution for Eily.
This is no surprise to any reader who has followed Eily through the earlier book Lesser Bohemians. We know she loves words and can form and reform them endlessly in her head in bursts of almost poetry: "So turned my trespass towards other air." And always with enough literary echoes to satisfy any reader (in the 'trespass' line, I heard an echo from 'Romeo and Juliet' (and it's not amiss to draw a parallel between that star-crossed couple and Eily and her lover Stephen, though what keeps Eily and Stephen apart for some of the book is matter of a different order. But in the utter intensity of Eily's passion, she does resemble Juliet)).
Yes, it's in her internal monologues that this book is at its best: "what a fine thing it is that thinking is private, no matter what company you’re in."
Sometimes her monologue becomes a dialogue between a first self and a second self (the second one in smaller font), and that interplay offers even more richness for the reader. And it's interesting to point out here that when Eily speaks in outward dialogue with Stephen, she uses the barest, plainest, most banal prose.
This is the fourth book I've read by Eimear McBride, and it is for her internal monologues and dialogues that I keep coming back. I don't come for plot twists and the tension that comes from them (there was a little too much of that for me here) but for the internal journey the main character experiences. Eily's internal journey here was tortured, and devastating for us readers at times, but I loved that by the end of it, the image she will see in the glass of the window overlooking the London street—where she has spent much of the story watching the city change its face—will also have changed its face. She is no longer yet another young woman who is lost in herself.
I cheered her transformation.
I thought of King Lear, whose dilemmas overwhelm him until his reason snaps. And I thought of Hamlet too, betimes mad, betimes super sane, and maybe actually neither?
And then I thought of Sylvia Plath's Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar, 'stewing in her own sour air' until she can't take it anymore.
Emer McBride's main character, a young drama student called Eily, has elements of all these characters in her make-up. She's like King Lear in the way she is overcome by conflicting feelings that prevent her seeing her way out of her dilemmas so that she drives herself "halfway to Bedlam in a blink–and not the new one, the original down by Liverpool Street, thronging with the stark staring mad. Even when I am searching for OFF, it’s an elusive thing–a feeling-around-in-the-dark type of switch, which I have no true talent for. I’m more wind up and keep winding, right the way to snap!"
And she's like Hamlet too, sometimes talking in riddles, sometimes incredibly astute.
But Esther Greenwood is perhaps the character she most resembles. They are both nineteen, both on the cusp of their lives and both suddenly terrified of being shunted into something that will stifle them. In fact they are both the embodiment of the image Eily sees reflected back at her from the window of her flat above the teeming London streets: yet another young woman who is lost in herself.
Because drama student Eily feels trapped by a future where she will always and only be offered roles that fit the image of the 'lost young woman'. The irony is that her mental disintegration (though less severe than Esther Greenwood's) means that she becomes 'lost in herself' to quite a brutal extent, and stews for a long while in 'her own sour air'. And not unlike Esther, the act of creating something out of words eventually provides a solution for Eily.
This is no surprise to any reader who has followed Eily through the earlier book Lesser Bohemians. We know she loves words and can form and reform them endlessly in her head in bursts of almost poetry: "So turned my trespass towards other air." And always with enough literary echoes to satisfy any reader (in the 'trespass' line, I heard an echo from 'Romeo and Juliet' (and it's not amiss to draw a parallel between that star-crossed couple and Eily and her lover Stephen, though what keeps Eily and Stephen apart for some of the book is matter of a different order. But in the utter intensity of Eily's passion, she does resemble Juliet)).
Yes, it's in her internal monologues that this book is at its best: "what a fine thing it is that thinking is private, no matter what company you’re in."
Sometimes her monologue becomes a dialogue between a first self and a second self (the second one in smaller font), and that interplay offers even more richness for the reader. And it's interesting to point out here that when Eily speaks in outward dialogue with Stephen, she uses the barest, plainest, most banal prose.
This is the fourth book I've read by Eimear McBride, and it is for her internal monologues and dialogues that I keep coming back. I don't come for plot twists and the tension that comes from them (there was a little too much of that for me here) but for the internal journey the main character experiences. Eily's internal journey here was tortured, and devastating for us readers at times, but I loved that by the end of it, the image she will see in the glass of the window overlooking the London street—where she has spent much of the story watching the city change its face—will also have changed its face. She is no longer yet another young woman who is lost in herself.
I cheered her transformation.
February 1, 2025
This is... stunning. I've just finished listening to the audio, choked up with emotion - and with the beauty of this story and McBride's way of telling it. There's a sort of meta element as both Stephen and Eilie within the text offer up their own stories - he through a film of his past life, she through a novel at the very end - but the main book is told through Eilie's voice, even when it's mostly dialogue, alternating between the past and 'now'.
It's a conventional structure but there's nothing predictable about McBride's voice with its rhythmical pulse, assonance, full and partial rhymes that render the text so lyrical. But, for all the 'experimental' prose, there's also a raw intensity that cuts through any such experimentation - here the stylistic choices draw us closer into Eilie's head, claustrophobic and confused as that space might be.
I think what I'm saying is that this is a highly-crafted piece that both draws attention to and renders invisible its own artificiality in the service of the intimacy in which this story resides. I'm in awe of how McBride pulls off this balancing act. She manages to make the text feel pared back while drawing us almost uncomfortably close to her characters. Similarly, we understand so much about Eily, yet we don't know any more of what has happened than Stephen does, adding a feverish desire to know that drives the last sections. And the moments of intertexts - notably, a few mentions of the snow falling softly recalling Joyce's The Dead - are a testament to both literary craft and work beautifully to add a resonance to the scene.
I haven't read The Lesser Bohemians to which this is a sequel of sorts though it sounds like some of the past-set sections are set during the timeline of that book. This also reveals things that were kept hidden for much of that first book, according to other readers - it didn't bother me but some more literal readers may want to read Bohemians first. In any case, I can safely say that I'll be reading everything else that McBride has published very soon.
I listened to the audiobook read beautifully by McBride herself. I suspect reading the book will be a subtly different experience, and that the two media will complement each other in productive ways.
A gorgeous book, then, that touched and moved me, combined with a blazing literary talent that has managed to render a sense of real life lived on the page.
Huge thanks to Bolinda Audio for an ARC audiobook via NetGalley
It's a conventional structure but there's nothing predictable about McBride's voice with its rhythmical pulse, assonance, full and partial rhymes that render the text so lyrical. But, for all the 'experimental' prose, there's also a raw intensity that cuts through any such experimentation - here the stylistic choices draw us closer into Eilie's head, claustrophobic and confused as that space might be.
I think what I'm saying is that this is a highly-crafted piece that both draws attention to and renders invisible its own artificiality in the service of the intimacy in which this story resides. I'm in awe of how McBride pulls off this balancing act. She manages to make the text feel pared back while drawing us almost uncomfortably close to her characters. Similarly, we understand so much about Eily, yet we don't know any more of what has happened than Stephen does, adding a feverish desire to know that drives the last sections. And the moments of intertexts - notably, a few mentions of the snow falling softly recalling Joyce's The Dead - are a testament to both literary craft and work beautifully to add a resonance to the scene.
I haven't read The Lesser Bohemians to which this is a sequel of sorts though it sounds like some of the past-set sections are set during the timeline of that book. This also reveals things that were kept hidden for much of that first book, according to other readers - it didn't bother me but some more literal readers may want to read Bohemians first. In any case, I can safely say that I'll be reading everything else that McBride has published very soon.
I listened to the audiobook read beautifully by McBride herself. I suspect reading the book will be a subtly different experience, and that the two media will complement each other in productive ways.
A gorgeous book, then, that touched and moved me, combined with a blazing literary talent that has managed to render a sense of real life lived on the page.
Huge thanks to Bolinda Audio for an ARC audiobook via NetGalley
March 11, 2025
Damn, this review will hurt to write, and perhaps when I finish writing it, I will understand what I think about this messy book…
First of all, this is not a standalone—at least I don’t think so. This is a sequel to the magnificent Lesser Bohemians, which I love with all my literary heart. I know for a fact that this book worked for people who never read the first one—worked very much—but there are a lot of references to the first book. Without reading it, you won’t understand the importance of the character Rafi, for example. Or without knowing what Stephen put Eily through, the scene after he returns from Vancouver and is hiding something from her—which makes her heart (and ours) sink and slack against the wall—will mean so little. Stephen is a saint and completely devoted and faithful here, after all; all that mess is done with. So many scenes like that.
So remarkably, even though both of them are older, Stephen has become an adult in this relationship, which he never was before. The first book is all about his arrested development and Eily, wise beyond her years, trying to hold this relationship together. I guess his sudden maturing and growing up made Eily remember she was a kid not long ago—so who the fuck is this girl? I didn’t like Eily in this book. She became obtuse, childish, so much so that I started to root for Stephen to stop taking this crap. The only way to understand why he kept going was by remembering the love (and shame) from book one because—where did the love go?
Jeez, I sound negative, don’t I?
And you need to know that I loved the first half, and I read this whole book in one day—at first with excitement and propulsion, and then in disbelief. Because every ending I’ve read by McBride delivers. In every book of hers, the ending was powerful: in A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, in Lesser Bohemians, and in the critically panned Strange Hotel. And here? It left me scratching my head. And wanting to beg Eily to get medicated and get a lot of mental health support. This is what McBride left me with. Do I believe in them after this book? No.
The structure of this book was a choice. See, in the middle of this book, we get a scene-by-scene description of Stephen’s biographical film—fictionalized—yet we are essentially getting the story he told Eily in that Rochesteresque monologue so many readers did not like. I liked it fine there, and here… Film is a visual art, and I feel like the scene-by-scene description of even the most glorious artsy film can read as very ridiculous on paper, don’t you? I mean, she was working on a screenplay for Lesser Bohemians, so I suppose that’s where it came from, but for me, it was unsuccessful—it broke the spell of the book, and it never returned.
Also, the obsessive nerd that I am, I watched and read interviews with her, and she said that the reason for writing this book was curiosity—curiosity about what happens next, after the passion of the beginning of a romance dies down. See, I am a lover of romance, but romance has it's rules. As Anne Carson beautifully said in her essay Eros the Bittersweet:
"There's something paradoxical in the relations between a novelist and his lovers. As a writer, he knows the story must end and wants it to end. So, too, as readers, we know the novel must end and want it to end. "But not yet!" say the readers to the writer. "But not yet!" says the writer to his hero and heroine. "But not yet!" says the beloved to the lover. And so the reach of desire continues."
So when the romance is resolved, I’m kinda done. These are fictional characters anyway. But still, I was curious, and In McBride We Trust, etc… So I was waiting for some progress in their relationship. And as I mentioned before, they are different; they changed (ha, even though the whole point of the ending is her fear of change, wanting it yet wanting to stop it, can't dealing with it, hence the title. but also clumsily spelled out). Their relationship? It’s still sex, just sex. The type of sex life where if they have a dry spell lasting for two days, they begin to crawl up the walls and behave like shits. What am I reading? What is the foundation of this relationship?
God, I really hated the ending—I understand now. I don’t know, I might reread it someday and change (ha!) my mind, but for now, I’m disappointed.
------------
I've literally never been more excited in my life for a new release. I'm also dreading it.
First of all, this is not a standalone—at least I don’t think so. This is a sequel to the magnificent Lesser Bohemians, which I love with all my literary heart. I know for a fact that this book worked for people who never read the first one—worked very much—but there are a lot of references to the first book. Without reading it, you won’t understand the importance of the character Rafi, for example. Or without knowing what Stephen put Eily through, the scene after he returns from Vancouver and is hiding something from her—which makes her heart (and ours) sink and slack against the wall—will mean so little. Stephen is a saint and completely devoted and faithful here, after all; all that mess is done with. So many scenes like that.
So remarkably, even though both of them are older, Stephen has become an adult in this relationship, which he never was before. The first book is all about his arrested development and Eily, wise beyond her years, trying to hold this relationship together. I guess his sudden maturing and growing up made Eily remember she was a kid not long ago—so who the fuck is this girl? I didn’t like Eily in this book. She became obtuse, childish, so much so that I started to root for Stephen to stop taking this crap. The only way to understand why he kept going was by remembering the love (and shame) from book one because—where did the love go?
Jeez, I sound negative, don’t I?
And you need to know that I loved the first half, and I read this whole book in one day—at first with excitement and propulsion, and then in disbelief. Because every ending I’ve read by McBride delivers. In every book of hers, the ending was powerful: in A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, in Lesser Bohemians, and in the critically panned Strange Hotel. And here? It left me scratching my head. And wanting to beg Eily to get medicated and get a lot of mental health support. This is what McBride left me with. Do I believe in them after this book? No.
The structure of this book was a choice. See, in the middle of this book, we get a scene-by-scene description of Stephen’s biographical film—fictionalized—yet we are essentially getting the story he told Eily in that Rochesteresque monologue so many readers did not like. I liked it fine there, and here… Film is a visual art, and I feel like the scene-by-scene description of even the most glorious artsy film can read as very ridiculous on paper, don’t you? I mean, she was working on a screenplay for Lesser Bohemians, so I suppose that’s where it came from, but for me, it was unsuccessful—it broke the spell of the book, and it never returned.
Also, the obsessive nerd that I am, I watched and read interviews with her, and she said that the reason for writing this book was curiosity—curiosity about what happens next, after the passion of the beginning of a romance dies down. See, I am a lover of romance, but romance has it's rules. As Anne Carson beautifully said in her essay Eros the Bittersweet:
"There's something paradoxical in the relations between a novelist and his lovers. As a writer, he knows the story must end and wants it to end. So, too, as readers, we know the novel must end and want it to end. "But not yet!" say the readers to the writer. "But not yet!" says the writer to his hero and heroine. "But not yet!" says the beloved to the lover. And so the reach of desire continues."
So when the romance is resolved, I’m kinda done. These are fictional characters anyway. But still, I was curious, and In McBride We Trust, etc… So I was waiting for some progress in their relationship. And as I mentioned before, they are different; they changed (ha, even though the whole point of the ending is her fear of change, wanting it yet wanting to stop it, can't dealing with it, hence the title. but also clumsily spelled out). Their relationship? It’s still sex, just sex. The type of sex life where if they have a dry spell lasting for two days, they begin to crawl up the walls and behave like shits. What am I reading? What is the foundation of this relationship?
God, I really hated the ending—I understand now. I don’t know, I might reread it someday and change (ha!) my mind, but for now, I’m disappointed.
------------
I've literally never been more excited in my life for a new release. I'm also dreading it.
October 21, 2025
A book that takes over a month to finish is a big sign that it is BAD.
Part 1- my incoherent rambling response-
WOW, was this book BAD?!!
The stream of consciousness... pretentious!
I did not
care for any of the
characters because this was one of the most baffling
boring
terrible books!
have READ in a very LONG time!
Part 2- My coherent and wistful reflection of another book…
Note: I loved the book "The Lesser Bohemians" which I read back in 2018 on a lark from the library. I thought Ms. McBride wrote a gorgeous love story that had been written many times before- older man, younger woman, torrid sexual affair, passionate love. She wrote that novel with a heightened sense of passion that drew me in, and I really felt for Stephen and Eily.
Little did I know when I grabbed this book that their affair is at a crossroads when Stephen's daughter Grace shows up in their lives, and Stephen is starring in a film that seems to mirror his love story. I felt this book was one of the biggest reading disappointments ever- and I don't care if I read anything by McBride for a while. It really bored the fuck out of me, I didn't give one iota of a damn to any of these characters, and I found myself LAUGHING
Most APPROPRIATELY? or INAPPROPRIATELY when I read this
Piece of shite
That broke my reading heart
Because I wished for something
better.
Part 1- my incoherent rambling response-
WOW, was this book BAD?!!
The stream of consciousness... pretentious!
I did not
care for any of the
characters because this was one of the most baffling
boring
terrible books!
have READ in a very LONG time!
Part 2- My coherent and wistful reflection of another book…
Note: I loved the book "The Lesser Bohemians" which I read back in 2018 on a lark from the library. I thought Ms. McBride wrote a gorgeous love story that had been written many times before- older man, younger woman, torrid sexual affair, passionate love. She wrote that novel with a heightened sense of passion that drew me in, and I really felt for Stephen and Eily.
Little did I know when I grabbed this book that their affair is at a crossroads when Stephen's daughter Grace shows up in their lives, and Stephen is starring in a film that seems to mirror his love story. I felt this book was one of the biggest reading disappointments ever- and I don't care if I read anything by McBride for a while. It really bored the fuck out of me, I didn't give one iota of a damn to any of these characters, and I found myself LAUGHING
Most APPROPRIATELY? or INAPPROPRIATELY when I read this
Piece of shite
That broke my reading heart
Because I wished for something
better.
June 20, 2025
Eimear McBride returns to Eily and Stephen of The Lesser Bohemians not long after the events of that novel. Though you arguably don't have to read that novel before picking this one up, I highly encourage it to get a better psychological portrait of the characters going into this story and where they are coming from. Plus, it's a knockout book that I read nearly 8 years ago now and still think about regularly. I was pleased that McBride revisited these characters and seemed to evolve her writing even further to delve into the psyche and motivations of these tortured artists.
The contents of this book mainly take place over one night in December 1996. A conversation must be had between the two lovers. Stephen, 39, is working on a semi-autobiographical film of his life and performing on the West End at the same time; while Eily, barely 20, is reclusive, recovering from some unnamed incident that has broken her down and caused an icy wall to go up between her and Stephen. Meanwhile, she reflects heavily on the last 18 months or so in their relationship after they moved into a new apartment together, and Stephen's daughter Grace (nearly the same age as Eily!) comes to visit.
Jumping back and forth regularly between the past and present, with a lengthy interlude of the characters watching a rough cut of Stephen's movie in great detail, the novel is mostly concerned with how we process our trauma. For some, it's an external act, a cathartic exploration outside of oneself to create and share with others, with the hope of making the burden for oneself lighter. For others, the trauma is internalized, perhaps processed more slowly or privately, or sadly not at all, until it combusts. Whether we can make amends while the city (or world) around us constantly changes its face, sometimes feeling like a friend and other times a foe, relies on how we respond to these past and present traumas.
As with The Lesser Bohemians this is by no means an easy read, both structurally and thematically. It deals with some VERY intense subject matter throughout, so please look up trigger warnings if you are to pick up either of these books. How McBride manages to convey all of this, though, is masterful.
Her writing is true stream of consciousness; I don't think I've ever read writing like hers that accurately conveys the in-real-time through processes of an individual, warts and all. They are ugly thoughts living in the same sentence as beautiful sentiments. Nearly manic inclinations balanced by the sedative of watching falling snow and taking a deep breath. She comes to her characters without judgment, when it's so easy to look at these characters and label them as toxic. Maybe they are? But what McBride does, rather than paint then in any particular light, is let the live on the page and nearly walk off it into the streets of London.
While I didn't love the way this book prioritized shorter scenes constantly cutting back and forth between the past and present, and the 70ish pages spent on Stephen's film script could've been cut down a bit, I think McBride is such a compelling and impressive writer I was still stunned by this book and would definitely like to revisit it again in the future (but not quite yet). I would even love for her to revisit these characters down the line, perhaps seeing where they end up 20 or 30 years later.
The contents of this book mainly take place over one night in December 1996. A conversation must be had between the two lovers. Stephen, 39, is working on a semi-autobiographical film of his life and performing on the West End at the same time; while Eily, barely 20, is reclusive, recovering from some unnamed incident that has broken her down and caused an icy wall to go up between her and Stephen. Meanwhile, she reflects heavily on the last 18 months or so in their relationship after they moved into a new apartment together, and Stephen's daughter Grace (nearly the same age as Eily!) comes to visit.
Jumping back and forth regularly between the past and present, with a lengthy interlude of the characters watching a rough cut of Stephen's movie in great detail, the novel is mostly concerned with how we process our trauma. For some, it's an external act, a cathartic exploration outside of oneself to create and share with others, with the hope of making the burden for oneself lighter. For others, the trauma is internalized, perhaps processed more slowly or privately, or sadly not at all, until it combusts. Whether we can make amends while the city (or world) around us constantly changes its face, sometimes feeling like a friend and other times a foe, relies on how we respond to these past and present traumas.
As with The Lesser Bohemians this is by no means an easy read, both structurally and thematically. It deals with some VERY intense subject matter throughout, so please look up trigger warnings if you are to pick up either of these books. How McBride manages to convey all of this, though, is masterful.
Her writing is true stream of consciousness; I don't think I've ever read writing like hers that accurately conveys the in-real-time through processes of an individual, warts and all. They are ugly thoughts living in the same sentence as beautiful sentiments. Nearly manic inclinations balanced by the sedative of watching falling snow and taking a deep breath. She comes to her characters without judgment, when it's so easy to look at these characters and label them as toxic. Maybe they are? But what McBride does, rather than paint then in any particular light, is let the live on the page and nearly walk off it into the streets of London.
While I didn't love the way this book prioritized shorter scenes constantly cutting back and forth between the past and present, and the 70ish pages spent on Stephen's film script could've been cut down a bit, I think McBride is such a compelling and impressive writer I was still stunned by this book and would definitely like to revisit it again in the future (but not quite yet). I would even love for her to revisit these characters down the line, perhaps seeing where they end up 20 or 30 years later.
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March 12, 2025Make beauty and life from all the fuck-ups. Mine. People’s. Whatever interested me. Never find myself full of thought, but a loss, and then discover intention through work and more fuck-ups, more fuck-ups and work, until a thing got made.
That was a kind of revelation to Eily, the main character and the voice of this novel. This might be also a suitable articulation of McBride’s own artistic credo. “...work and more fuck-ups, more fuck-ups and work, until a thing got made” echoes Samuel Beckett in Worstward Ho: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Both authors seem to celebrate the power of human resilience, ability to recover from a perceived or real “failure” and a thrive for perfection in art. Notably, the older writer does not mention “beauty” in this context.
“To make beauty of fuck ups” seem to be the main creative urge of the two leading characters in this novel, the lovers and creative souls. On the meta-level, that is also how this novel is written by McBride. To what extent it works? Do “fuck-ups” need to be beautiful, ugly or neither for the writing to be affective?
What is more effective in making the reader co-exist with the characters in traumatic situations: visceral narrating of numerous incidents one piling on the top of each other, spelling out a lot of sensory details almost to the point of making it “artsy”? Or alternatively a sparse, understated writing, only suggesting, leaving the reader a space to use her imagination to fill the blanks? That was the question I ended up asking myself after finishing reading this book. And I have to admit I am torn. I’ve read a few successful examples of the former before. The one of them that stayed with me forever is The Story of a Brief Marriage. But that book is situated in a totally different context. This novel, however, moves the scales for me towards the latter. I admire a lot of aspects of this work by McBride, especially its language and technical versatility. But the others I found extremely trying.
When i was fourteen year old, I’ve written in my diary something like that: one can enjoy suffering almost as much as one can enjoy happiness and joy. However, in a few following years I’ve painstakingly but naturally taught myself the difference between these two “enjoyments”. I’ve learned how to avoid a seductive allure of self-destruction, even if it would seem to unleash some latent creative impulses. Eily’s behaviour has reminded me of my fourteen year old self. But she is twenty in the novel and in long-term serious relationship.
I am sure McBride would agree that inherently there is nothing “beautiful” in trauma. Of course an attempt to underscore the aesthetic element in narration of a traumatic experience would be perceived differently by different readers. Where one person would feel manipulated another would feel “radically” empathetic. By captivating the reader, a “seductive power of identification” often wins battles on behalf of literature.
In his widely quoted letter to a friend, young Kafka wrote a phrase “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”. This is probably the one of the most quoted sentences. I am personally guilty of using it for a second time in a few months. It is hard to disagree with this sentiment. However, in the letter it is preceded by the following:
But we need the books that affect us like a misfortune that pains us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished to the woods far from everyone, like suicide.
Reading “The City” has reminded me of this part of the letter once more. I am quite certain i would not want anyone to be affected by a novel to such an extent. In extreme, it would mean a person reading “Anna Karenina” ending up under a train. Sadly, such cases are not unprecedented in real life. Fortunately, they are pretty extreme by any proportion. Coming back to the McBride’s novel it would be fair to say that it celebrates the resilience and it is a sufficiently nuanced work in spite of making me revisiting Kafka’s saying.
It is also a technically compelling novel. In 2023 Elmear McBride wrote and directed “A very short film about Longing” . I assume she was writing this book at the same time as both works seem to “bootstrap” each other. Some cinematic techniques are evident in the novel’s design: the main events take place during a single night (“The Now”) in a small kitchen of a small flat which would be great for close-up of details and sharp camera angles conveying a claustrophobic atmosphere and the heaviness of the conversation between the two lovers. It seems not for the first time, they are trying to reestablish some hope of understanding between each other that has slipped away before.
This book-length scene conveyed through Eily’s eye’s is frequently cut by the flashbacks into the recent past. The reader’s attention is firmly pinned by these frequent cuts between “The Now” and the scenes from the past, brisk verbal exchanges and the fractured state of Eily’s interiority.
The flashbacks are focused on a few backstories to the present. The one of them is focused on the recent visit by Stephen’s daughter and awkward dynamics it caused. Stephen is Eily’s boyfriend twenty years her senior and the daughter is almost her age. This part is the most interactive, pacy and psychologically thrilling.
Another flashback is a film. Often writers insert a book within a novel. McBride goes further and inserts a movie. Stephen is in the process of directing a film closely based on the “fuck-ups” of his youth. The film is in a montage stage. Eily together with Stephen’s daughter are watching the early cuts with him. A description of a film’s scene is followed by Eily’s brief observation on the quality of the scene, her exchange with Stephen or a reaction of the daughter before moving to the next cinematic cut. Incidentally, at some point during the night in “The Now”, Stephen cuts his hand on a broken glass. This seems as a symbol of connection between the present and the past, real life and its artistic representation.
A description of a painting used in fiction is called ekphrasis. I am not sure whether McBride’s technique of describing an imaginary film in combination with its meta-commentary falls under this category. But i’ve found it quite refreshing. It stood out especially in comparison with the other popular technique of describing the characters’ dream sequences used by novelists. Those dreams could be visceral, surreal or visually stunning but quite often they do not fit well with the overall texture of the novel. In contrast, McBride’s film cuts were well placed and meta-commentary has added an additional layer. My only reservation with this part was that it was too many of them especially in relation to the subject matter (heavy drug use, sexual violence, remorse, recovery, self-harm, rinse and repeat). After the nth scene my conscience simply went numb and stopped appreciating the visual or even emotional depth of that film. A fewer of these cuts would make a bigger impact. However, the film is “shown” in full length: it takes eighty five pages (a quarter of the whole book) and shows more than sixty individual scenes. I suppose i was invited to be a part of the audience and experience the magic art of cinematic creation. But i’ve struggled with the sheer volume of this. It did not help that the same story of Stephen’s traumatic past was related in detail in The Lesser Bohemians, a prequel of a sorts to “The City”. Nevertheless, it seems evident how much McBride has enjoyed the process of directing a film both on a page and in real life.
From a perspective of the craft, I’ve got the most pleasure from her sentences and the narration’s voice. McBride’s sentences are sheer poetry: “That first, never finished, version of myself that haunts the old haunts of was.” Some of them combine philosophic depth with a stunning image, like this one, for example: “Every moment but a crease where time bends itself before, finally, folding right in.”
Occasionally in her turn of phrase I’ve found an echo of Beckett: “a back left cold in the dark” has reminded the opening sentence of Samuel Beckett's Company/Compagnie and A Piece of Monologue/Solo: A Bilingual Variorum Edition where a voice comes “To one on his back in the dark”. Or consider, for example, this sentence: “All because the new want wanted its wicked way.” Like the Beckett’s it is made of simple words, broken syntax and full of music. The final scene of a snowfall echoes Joyce’s The Dead. These elaborate phrases and scenes are interspersed by Eily’s more matter of a fact half-full-sentence rhythmical narration that rapidly moves the reader alone. She also possesses her own deeper internal voice that occasionally gets in a way interrupting the usual flow of her thoughts. All these techniques are impressive.
The imagery of blood plays the role of uniting beauty with “fuck ups” as well as a body’s pleasure and pain with a soul’s recklessness and redemption. Figurative blood symbolises connection between the kin and separation from strangers. Actual blood is ubiquitous on the page: test results, blood transfusions, blood in veins, in cuts and bites, blood in sex, blood on the floor, blood on the walls: numerous visceral paintings with words often not for half-hearted. The word is used at least seventy times. If there is someone squeamish reading this, please skip a few paragraphs.
Eventually this constant backdrop has managed to amplify the sense of foreboding and dread that I’ve started to experience in the second half of the novel. Eventually I’ve developed a conviction that to show a dramatic moment in a relationship there was no need to fill in the pages with the rivers of blood. A cynic in me recollected a moto of sensational media: “if it bleeds, it leads” and i could not get rid off it for the rest of the narrative.
In spite of the elaborate sentences and clever cinematic structure, I’ve become progressively tired of “beauty” and of sheer quantity of ��fuck ups” that didn’t seem to follow from what I knew about the same characters from “The Lesser Bohemians”. I think knowing their pre-history did not help to believe the plot’s development McBride has prepared for this “film” on the page. I suspect this book would be more appreciated by the readers unfamiliar with the first book. I’ve become equally tired of suspense or should we call it “conceit” of Eily’s trauma. I could not appreciate that Mc Bride has tried to maintain the mystery around it until the last fifty pages. And when the “conceit” has been finally revealed it was exactly something I dreaded it would be. But even in this she went for an excess: the two most difficult traumatic experiences combined when the one of them would be more than enough.
I could go on and write another few paragraphs what I've found a bit underwhelming in the excesses of the plot and characters’ development. For a book driven by language it was too much of a plot. And for a book driven by the situation, some plot choices of characters’ actions were questionable. But at this stage, I am even tired of writing the review.
To finish on a more positive note, there was a big "consolation" and a glimpse of hope at the end of the novel: a kind of broad stroke, but intimate symbolism that the suffering is not in vain: sometimes it brings about an “authentic” creative act. In blood and sex, and sweat, and pain, and loss a new writer was born. Was it worth it? I guess it is the wrong question.
Words after another. Sentences, in a while. Pages becoming, over weeks, alive. Full with all of it. Everything there. The annoying harmless and harmful as well. Reimagining its logic when lost for sense or the rest of me fell short. But told it best as language could and with the truths only fiction allowed. Hard ones. Now and then. New ones, that kept thought grinding. Wide ones, that forced the world right in. Free ones, that told me, this was a beginning. If I wanted it to be.
Maybe if instead of reading the whole novel i would just have read this passage, i would treasure the experience more dearly.
PS
While I was finalising the review I remembered about the article I've read a few years ago. The case against trauma plot by Parul Sehgal. It is a great article. I've looked it up and it is appeared to be relevant to my experience of reading this novel. It is brilliantly and polemically written. So I decided to share a few quotes here that I think are apt:
How might today’s novelists depict Woolf’s Mrs. Brown? Who is our representative character? We’d meet her, I imagine, in profile or bare outline. Self-entranced, withholding, giving off a fragrance of unspecified damage.
Unlike the marriage plot, the trauma plot does not direct our curiosity toward the future (Will they or won’t they?) but back into the past (What happened to her?)
Tell it in a modernist sensory rush with the punctuation falling away.
Certainly the filmmakers of classical Hollywood cinema were quite able to bring characters to life without portentous flashbacks to formative torments. In contrast, characters are now created in order to be dispatched into the past, to truffle for trauma.
August 26, 2025
I missed on this one.
With so much praise heaped upon it, I felt I completely missed the boat on “The City Changes Its Face.” It has been described as a "difficult read," a sentiment I share. Initially I was taken with the writing, with lines reminding me of Samuel Beckett’s style.
We meet Stephen and Eily, characters introduced in author Eimear McBride’s 2016 novel, “The Lesser Bohemians.” Stephen is a 40-year-old actor and Eily is a 20-year-old student. Their two-year relationship is complicated by Stephen's reconnection with his daughter, Grace, who is only two years Eily's junior. The narrative alternates between the early stages of their relationship and the present.
Halfway through, Stephen's autobiographical film is presented to Eily and Grace, detailing his traumatic life, including childhood sexual abuse, his struggles with addiction, and his treatment of Grace's mother. Despite the horrific nature of many scenes, this lengthy scripting serves as a somewhat cumbersome method to show us Stephen's past.
I appreciated much of the writing, particularly the first third of the book. After that it seemed a slow trudge to get where it was going. I found myself pushing to continue, hoping to catch some of the magic other reviewers have enjoyed. A second reading may be in order; I just need to recuperate from this first. Giving the benefit of the doubt– three stars in the belief that I just missed a connection.
Thank you to Faber and Faber and NetGalley for providing an advance reader copy in exchange for an honest review. #TheCityChangesItsFace #NetGalley
With so much praise heaped upon it, I felt I completely missed the boat on “The City Changes Its Face.” It has been described as a "difficult read," a sentiment I share. Initially I was taken with the writing, with lines reminding me of Samuel Beckett’s style.
We meet Stephen and Eily, characters introduced in author Eimear McBride’s 2016 novel, “The Lesser Bohemians.” Stephen is a 40-year-old actor and Eily is a 20-year-old student. Their two-year relationship is complicated by Stephen's reconnection with his daughter, Grace, who is only two years Eily's junior. The narrative alternates between the early stages of their relationship and the present.
Halfway through, Stephen's autobiographical film is presented to Eily and Grace, detailing his traumatic life, including childhood sexual abuse, his struggles with addiction, and his treatment of Grace's mother. Despite the horrific nature of many scenes, this lengthy scripting serves as a somewhat cumbersome method to show us Stephen's past.
I appreciated much of the writing, particularly the first third of the book. After that it seemed a slow trudge to get where it was going. I found myself pushing to continue, hoping to catch some of the magic other reviewers have enjoyed. A second reading may be in order; I just need to recuperate from this first. Giving the benefit of the doubt– three stars in the belief that I just missed a connection.
Thank you to Faber and Faber and NetGalley for providing an advance reader copy in exchange for an honest review. #TheCityChangesItsFace #NetGalley
kindle-top-tier
April 30, 2025If she were half as clever as she thinks she is, she would have called this sequel to her autobiographical The Lesser Bohemians McBride Revisited.
February 13, 2025
Happy publication day 🥳🎉
The writing is stunning, lyrical and beautiful, the narration equally so, however I struggled to find my fit in the void of the age gap relationship, something made me a bit indifferent as to whether they found their way together or not.
If you’re looking for a conversation/dialogue study piece, this would be interesting, for me the story was too thin to hold the weight of the words.
My thanks as to Bolinda Audio and NetGalley for this ALC to review 🎧
The writing is stunning, lyrical and beautiful, the narration equally so, however I struggled to find my fit in the void of the age gap relationship, something made me a bit indifferent as to whether they found their way together or not.
If you’re looking for a conversation/dialogue study piece, this would be interesting, for me the story was too thin to hold the weight of the words.
My thanks as to Bolinda Audio and NetGalley for this ALC to review 🎧
February 23, 2025
I requested an ARC through Netgalley, but since it was declined, I opted for the audiobook instead and I'm so glad I did! I was a bit anxious at first, as I prefer to read rather than listen to literary novels. But Eimear McBride was the narrator and she does a wonderful job here. I loved the way she went about it and I was really drawn in by her storytelling and voice. It's an intense and intimate story about love and the hardships and struggles in life, going back and forth in time. Often hard to listen to, but at the same time beautifully done. Absolutely brilliant and highly recommended!
Thank you Bolinda Audio and Netgalley UK for the audiobook.
Thank you Bolinda Audio and Netgalley UK for the audiobook.
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April 2, 2025Two Questions About Modernist Language
The City Changes Its Face has been well reviewed by Damon Galgut in the TLS (February 7, 2025) and Lucy Hughes-Hallett in The Guardian (January 30). I don’t need to add to those evocations. I want instead to propose two questions about language. Hughes-Hallett notes that McBride “handles words”:
She uses verbs as nouns, nouns as adjectives. On a hot day “the boil outside makes sloth of in here”; on a cold one, a caress is “a skate of chill hands”. Stephen’s damaging history is “the past’s thwart of your now”. McBride coins new words: “blindling” for blindly stumbling. She gives familiar ones new cogency by misplacing them: “all his vaunt’s gone”.
Much more needs to be said about this handling. Sometimes it’s lyrical in a modernist vein, with alliterations and poetic rhythm, as here, describing people running out of the way of taxicabs in the pouring rain:
All those rushers in their dashes from the gutter spouts of taxis. [p. 2]
That’s imagist, like Pound or Stieglitz, but also incantatory, like H.D. Other times the prose is clipped like Marianne Moore:
Dropping his eyes, intrigued then, from mine as I stand, anxious sentinel. [p. 316]
Or perhaps that’s more Stevens than Moore. On the same page there’s this:
My preferred perch. Pull back the curtain and sit into its ledge. Last of the last of the night reached already.
This is pure Joyce, a mixture of Ulysses (that first sentence) and Finnegans Wake (the chained alliterations of the last sentence, ending on an adverb).
I am delighted McBride is still roughing up language like she did in her first novel. For me, much of the interest of her writing is her antiphonal response to modernism, inevitably mainly Joyce. She has written about him several times. Here she is in an interview in The Guardian (September 2, 2022):
The book or author I came back to
I first picked up James Joyce’s Ulysses when I was about 18 and put it down again quite soon after that – it was a bit more than I was after at that point. I was 25 before I thought: “Now’s the time” and Ulysses is the only second-chance book I’ve ever been amazed by. Why? Ah, come on, you know why.
The book I reread
See above. Ulysses is also the only book that I reread in adulthood, and why not? Every time you jump into it you end up climbing out in a different place. I mean, money-wise alone, you do get a lot of bang for your buck.
Before that there’s the essay “My Hero: Eimear McBride on James Joyce,” also in The Guardian (June 6, 2014), in which she speaks in general terms about his demanding language. Joyce, she says, is:
a great lesson for writers who don't at first succeed… He saw that there were parts of life that could not be described by conventional language, and that was the jumping off point for me. I think Joyce would struggle to be published today, and our literary and cultural life would be the poorer for his absence.
I’ll put my two questions succintly, because I wouldn’t know quite how to expand them.
First, it’s not clear exactly how she thinks about what she’s doing with Joyce. She “handles” words in ways that he sometimes did, but often didn’t, and there is a deliberation and method to the changes she makes. Ulysses was the model of concise dialogue for much of modernism, and in this new book dialogue is even more truncated, given fewer punctuation marks and allotted plenty of blank space. Finnegans Wake is poetic in many passages, and McBride does that too. I don’t understand why reviewers are satisfied to talk about her assault on language in such general terms (“handling,” shifting nouns to verbs), when modernist wrestling with language has been so specific to its different contexts. (Early Beckett and his preciosity, late Beckett and his strangulation, Celan and his anguish against German, William Carlos Williams with his fractured clarity...) Is there an account of McBride’s language that I’ve somehow missed? Why hasn’t she herself pointed people to individual strategies, models, targets? Why isn’t there more talk about the trajectory of this kind of linguistic intervention in postmodern and contemporary fiction? It’s a rare phenomenon, and when it happens it’s remarked upon, but that seems to be where things are left. But what happens in McBride’s writing is specific and historically informed, and should be a central concern for readers.
Second, and this is an entirely different matter, I am still puzzled about the distance between the “handled,” precisely constricted prose, on the one hand, and the utterly ordinary dialogue, on the other. How do her characters manage to speak in common sentence fragments, with pauses, gulps, and flinches, and entirely unremarkable syntax and vocabulary, when the surrounding prose is so artificially constructed? This doesn’t happen in Joyce: as the prose developed, the characters’ speech grew along with it. Strange language permeates the reported speech in Finnegans Wake. In The City Changes Its Face, Eily, the protagonist, has been writing down her life, and at the end her partner reads her manuscript. He says it’s beautifully written. I assume we’re to assume it’s written like the prose we’ve been reading, and unlike the dialogue that’s been moving the stories along. How, I wonder, does McBride think about this contrast? How can readers think about it? Why—for example—doesn’t it spontaneously reverse, giving us pages of clipped ordinary prose description, framing lines of contorted and beautiful dialogue?
Just two questions, not a full reading. For that I feel like I’ll need to wait until she writes three or four more novels, and imagines her way out of the intense personal dramas that eat up her imagination. (There’s almost nothing in this novel except some glimpses of a grotty apartment, a view of London streets, a filthy sink, and a jar of picalilli sauce—remarkable for a couple so immersed in theater, film, and acting. When, I wonder, will the rest of the world emerge?)
The City Changes Its Face has been well reviewed by Damon Galgut in the TLS (February 7, 2025) and Lucy Hughes-Hallett in The Guardian (January 30). I don’t need to add to those evocations. I want instead to propose two questions about language. Hughes-Hallett notes that McBride “handles words”:
She uses verbs as nouns, nouns as adjectives. On a hot day “the boil outside makes sloth of in here”; on a cold one, a caress is “a skate of chill hands”. Stephen’s damaging history is “the past’s thwart of your now”. McBride coins new words: “blindling” for blindly stumbling. She gives familiar ones new cogency by misplacing them: “all his vaunt’s gone”.
Much more needs to be said about this handling. Sometimes it’s lyrical in a modernist vein, with alliterations and poetic rhythm, as here, describing people running out of the way of taxicabs in the pouring rain:
All those rushers in their dashes from the gutter spouts of taxis. [p. 2]
That’s imagist, like Pound or Stieglitz, but also incantatory, like H.D. Other times the prose is clipped like Marianne Moore:
Dropping his eyes, intrigued then, from mine as I stand, anxious sentinel. [p. 316]
Or perhaps that’s more Stevens than Moore. On the same page there’s this:
My preferred perch. Pull back the curtain and sit into its ledge. Last of the last of the night reached already.
This is pure Joyce, a mixture of Ulysses (that first sentence) and Finnegans Wake (the chained alliterations of the last sentence, ending on an adverb).
I am delighted McBride is still roughing up language like she did in her first novel. For me, much of the interest of her writing is her antiphonal response to modernism, inevitably mainly Joyce. She has written about him several times. Here she is in an interview in The Guardian (September 2, 2022):
The book or author I came back to
I first picked up James Joyce’s Ulysses when I was about 18 and put it down again quite soon after that – it was a bit more than I was after at that point. I was 25 before I thought: “Now’s the time” and Ulysses is the only second-chance book I’ve ever been amazed by. Why? Ah, come on, you know why.
The book I reread
See above. Ulysses is also the only book that I reread in adulthood, and why not? Every time you jump into it you end up climbing out in a different place. I mean, money-wise alone, you do get a lot of bang for your buck.
Before that there’s the essay “My Hero: Eimear McBride on James Joyce,” also in The Guardian (June 6, 2014), in which she speaks in general terms about his demanding language. Joyce, she says, is:
a great lesson for writers who don't at first succeed… He saw that there were parts of life that could not be described by conventional language, and that was the jumping off point for me. I think Joyce would struggle to be published today, and our literary and cultural life would be the poorer for his absence.
I’ll put my two questions succintly, because I wouldn’t know quite how to expand them.
First, it’s not clear exactly how she thinks about what she’s doing with Joyce. She “handles” words in ways that he sometimes did, but often didn’t, and there is a deliberation and method to the changes she makes. Ulysses was the model of concise dialogue for much of modernism, and in this new book dialogue is even more truncated, given fewer punctuation marks and allotted plenty of blank space. Finnegans Wake is poetic in many passages, and McBride does that too. I don’t understand why reviewers are satisfied to talk about her assault on language in such general terms (“handling,” shifting nouns to verbs), when modernist wrestling with language has been so specific to its different contexts. (Early Beckett and his preciosity, late Beckett and his strangulation, Celan and his anguish against German, William Carlos Williams with his fractured clarity...) Is there an account of McBride’s language that I’ve somehow missed? Why hasn’t she herself pointed people to individual strategies, models, targets? Why isn’t there more talk about the trajectory of this kind of linguistic intervention in postmodern and contemporary fiction? It’s a rare phenomenon, and when it happens it’s remarked upon, but that seems to be where things are left. But what happens in McBride’s writing is specific and historically informed, and should be a central concern for readers.
Second, and this is an entirely different matter, I am still puzzled about the distance between the “handled,” precisely constricted prose, on the one hand, and the utterly ordinary dialogue, on the other. How do her characters manage to speak in common sentence fragments, with pauses, gulps, and flinches, and entirely unremarkable syntax and vocabulary, when the surrounding prose is so artificially constructed? This doesn’t happen in Joyce: as the prose developed, the characters’ speech grew along with it. Strange language permeates the reported speech in Finnegans Wake. In The City Changes Its Face, Eily, the protagonist, has been writing down her life, and at the end her partner reads her manuscript. He says it’s beautifully written. I assume we’re to assume it’s written like the prose we’ve been reading, and unlike the dialogue that’s been moving the stories along. How, I wonder, does McBride think about this contrast? How can readers think about it? Why—for example—doesn’t it spontaneously reverse, giving us pages of clipped ordinary prose description, framing lines of contorted and beautiful dialogue?
Just two questions, not a full reading. For that I feel like I’ll need to wait until she writes three or four more novels, and imagines her way out of the intense personal dramas that eat up her imagination. (There’s almost nothing in this novel except some glimpses of a grotty apartment, a view of London streets, a filthy sink, and a jar of picalilli sauce—remarkable for a couple so immersed in theater, film, and acting. When, I wonder, will the rest of the world emerge?)
October 13, 2025
McBride’s The City Changes Its Faces uncovers Eily and Stephen’s domestic life. The two rotating sections—various points of reference leading up to now and now—could be summarized as Grace’s visit and pillow talk, respectively.
In the before, Stephen’s daughter, Grace, visits and lives with him and Eily in the cramped flat. Grace learns about her dad’s traumatic childhood, most notably through his autobiographical film. Written like a screenplay, readers follow the film unfold and experience the group’s viewing first and secondhand. In the now, Eily enters drama school as an upperclassman, and McBride keeps readers in Stephen’s perspective. With Stephen, 20 years Eily’s senior, we note Eily’s mercurial, secretive behavior. He slowly coaxes her, but she prevaricates, and we can’t piece together why.
I enjoyed The City Changes Its Faces for three reasons.
(1) While told entirely from Eily’s perspective, we never witness her showcasing her artistic work. We hear she’s a skilled actor, and she talks about plays and assignments. But it doesn’t go beyond this. Instead, we get to know Eily through her relationship with Stephen and how she views his work, which then tells us about Eily. As far as creating a skittish, unstable character goes, this refracted angling works.
(2) My second favorite aspect of the book is the fever-dream mood. The author keeps the localized light from the floor lamps dim; the dank walls need a dehumidifier to help us breathe.
(3) And, of course, we can’t forget to mention McBride’s sundered syntax. The author communicates ideas clearly in their vestigially packaged form, and I suspect I enjoy it because, try as I might, I for one do not verbally articulate well. For example, I pause a lot when I speak because I’m forming ideas and then constructing the sentences to express the ideas. As such, McBride’s style more accurately reflects regular speech patterns (including how people talk over each other and cut our sentences short). Yet we can exchange information.
CW: drug abuse, child abuse (physical, sexual), rape, cutting.
My thanks to Faber and Faber and Edelweiss for an ARC.
In the before, Stephen’s daughter, Grace, visits and lives with him and Eily in the cramped flat. Grace learns about her dad’s traumatic childhood, most notably through his autobiographical film. Written like a screenplay, readers follow the film unfold and experience the group’s viewing first and secondhand. In the now, Eily enters drama school as an upperclassman, and McBride keeps readers in Stephen’s perspective. With Stephen, 20 years Eily’s senior, we note Eily’s mercurial, secretive behavior. He slowly coaxes her, but she prevaricates, and we can’t piece together why.
I enjoyed The City Changes Its Faces for three reasons.
(1) While told entirely from Eily’s perspective, we never witness her showcasing her artistic work. We hear she’s a skilled actor, and she talks about plays and assignments. But it doesn’t go beyond this. Instead, we get to know Eily through her relationship with Stephen and how she views his work, which then tells us about Eily. As far as creating a skittish, unstable character goes, this refracted angling works.
(2) My second favorite aspect of the book is the fever-dream mood. The author keeps the localized light from the floor lamps dim; the dank walls need a dehumidifier to help us breathe.
(3) And, of course, we can’t forget to mention McBride’s sundered syntax. The author communicates ideas clearly in their vestigially packaged form, and I suspect I enjoy it because, try as I might, I for one do not verbally articulate well. For example, I pause a lot when I speak because I’m forming ideas and then constructing the sentences to express the ideas. As such, McBride’s style more accurately reflects regular speech patterns (including how people talk over each other and cut our sentences short). Yet we can exchange information.
CW: drug abuse, child abuse (physical, sexual), rape, cutting.
My thanks to Faber and Faber and Edelweiss for an ARC.
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December 25, 2024dnf @ 95 pages. couldn’t get into it and didn’t really like the writing style. might come back to it at a later date though.
October 15, 2025
Did not enjoy this unfortunately—found it to be a chore to get through and way too long. The writing style makes the inner thoughts and feelings of our main character all feel of equal weighting (ironic given the effort put into the different formatting and font sizes to show inner thoughts!), which bogs the whole thing down in melodrama
February 25, 2025
Should books be 25% movie? This one seems to think so.
3.5
3.5
Read
February 18, 2025I can both admire Eimear McBride's craft in writing this novel, and at the same time say that I really did not appreciate the experience of reading it. Should come with multiple trigger warnings.
April 29, 2025
this was a hard read, I'm not going to lie. it took me months to get through but I also can't give it any less than five stars. between the lyricism and poetry of McBride's writing and her genius in using typography and blank spaces it felt like walking through fog, never really knowing what is said and written. but once i got there and knew for sure I was utterly in awe and deep in my feelings.
May 29, 2025
I'm raging. Turns out this is a sequel of sorts (described as a "stand alone sequel" so not the end of the world)- as in I probably would have loved it EVEN MORE had I read The Lesser Bohemians first (guess what I'm currently doing...).
Anyways, the book was a gorgeous exploration of love, trauma, and the human condition. McBride's unique narrative style - indentations, flashbacks, self-dialogue - was an absolute joy and added much more to the characters and their interactions. I also loved the stylistic choice of the film segment and the insight it gave into Stephen, balancing against the bulk of narrative from Eily's perspective - yet another win for her experimental style. I'll be coming back to this. A solid 4.5 maybe even 5 stars (because I just can't stop thinking about it!!!).
Anyways, the book was a gorgeous exploration of love, trauma, and the human condition. McBride's unique narrative style - indentations, flashbacks, self-dialogue - was an absolute joy and added much more to the characters and their interactions. I also loved the stylistic choice of the film segment and the insight it gave into Stephen, balancing against the bulk of narrative from Eily's perspective - yet another win for her experimental style. I'll be coming back to this. A solid 4.5 maybe even 5 stars (because I just can't stop thinking about it!!!).
March 5, 2025
as someone who loves and has re read the the lesser bohemians many of times (and cries everytime) this is a big no for me, the structure (mainly the “film” section) really distracts from any emotional weight
August 7, 2025
echt een PRACHTIGE cover, kan er uren naar kijken, de inhoud toch iets minder mijn ding. ik vond het vaak disturbing en ging veel over bloed en dat wil ik gwn niet lezen, ergens vond ik het ook wel een leuk boek en vooral de manier waarop het geschreven is (veel witregels, chill) vond ik het wel leuk. ik lees nu dat dit eigenlijk het tweede deel was en als je lesser bohemian had gelezen je veel meer info had over de personages enz, dit had ik wel van te voren willen weten.
ik weet het allemaal nog ff niet
ik weet het allemaal nog ff niet
August 5, 2025
‘too easy here, on the leeside of the sun, to trip, topple and fall’
pure vernacular glamour - rough and beautiful and hopeful as snow becomes general over london
pure vernacular glamour - rough and beautiful and hopeful as snow becomes general over london
March 7, 2025
(4.5 💝) after being lucky enough to see Eimear and listen to her talk about this book in London I was both terrified and utterly excited to read it. It’s definitely not as suffocating emotionally as lesser bohemians but still heavy for most part, heavy as if someone was sitting on my chest, and I love that in Eimear’s books so much. Her writing style is so unique and poetic, I felt like I was drowning in words.
We get to see different sides of Eily and Stephen, they both have changed in very different ways. They now share a life together properly and the book focuses on that a lot though there still is a cloud above them made up of their past and things they have been through. It felt like there was a lot of desperation on both sides to stay together but there were so many things being lost in translation, the loneliness really pours out of this book. But it’s not all sad actually, there is some beautiful, wholesome moments that brought tears to my eyes.
I did however feel like the „movie” part was too long. It definitely had its place in the book but after all it did not do as much to the story as I think it was meant to. There were definitely a fair few bits that raised my eyebrow in pure confusion and I questioned it a lot in my head. The ending felt a bit rushed, the book peaked and then went down super fast at the end. But I think I am overall satisfied with how it all went, I had no idea what to expect but I deeply hope this isn’t it for Eily’s and Stephen’s story.
The lesser bohemians has a very special place in my heart, this book definitely has my love too but not quite as much. Though I’m sure I will carry on thinking about it for a long time. ❤️🔥
We get to see different sides of Eily and Stephen, they both have changed in very different ways. They now share a life together properly and the book focuses on that a lot though there still is a cloud above them made up of their past and things they have been through. It felt like there was a lot of desperation on both sides to stay together but there were so many things being lost in translation, the loneliness really pours out of this book. But it’s not all sad actually, there is some beautiful, wholesome moments that brought tears to my eyes.
I did however feel like the „movie” part was too long. It definitely had its place in the book but after all it did not do as much to the story as I think it was meant to. There were definitely a fair few bits that raised my eyebrow in pure confusion and I questioned it a lot in my head. The ending felt a bit rushed, the book peaked and then went down super fast at the end. But I think I am overall satisfied with how it all went, I had no idea what to expect but I deeply hope this isn’t it for Eily’s and Stephen’s story.
The lesser bohemians has a very special place in my heart, this book definitely has my love too but not quite as much. Though I’m sure I will carry on thinking about it for a long time. ❤️🔥
June 29, 2025
Hard work. The prose is by turns incredibly dense- tea is “spoon standingly strong” (not strong enough to stand your spoon in, and not just very strong)- and then sparse with the kind of “hm” he said, “what?” She said “oh nothing” he replied dialogue that is impenetrable, slow and boring. About a third of the plot is taken up with an account of the characters watching a movie that could best be described as Trainspotting without the humour, featuring one of the characters (yes gosh very meta) and is described blow by blow scene by scene including staging notes, which leaves you thinking McBride really just wants to be a scriptwriter. The main character is clearly traumatised and needs help. The plot centres on her relationship with an older man and the similarly aged daughter he introduces into their world. What a cliche. Apparently it’s a sequel but also a standalone. Well if you liked the first book go for it but on your own head be it.
September 11, 2025
Expectations were very high for the new Eimear McBride novel, especially after I learned it was a sequel to my beloved The Lesser Bohemians. Of course McBride is as excellent as ever and The City Changes Its Face is such an impressive book, both for its use of form as well as depth of feeling. However, I felt there was a far more interesting story waiting to be told about Eily years later, even thirty years on in the present day, rather than setting the book within eighteen months or so after the first book left off. The novels are about a lot of things really, but I was struck about how both are about the relationship between how memory is recounted and how art is made, and what happens when that story goes out to the world and is translated and interpreted by the reader, or viewer, or actor. It wasn't the book I wanted but was so rewarding and thought provoking nonetheless.
February 9, 2025
The story navigates a 20-year age gap, which is a lot and makes everything more complicated, yet it’s handled with depth and realism. The writing is well done, making the emotional weight of the characters' experiences feel genuine.
The audiobook enhances the story, drawing you in and making the complexities even more engaging. If you appreciate well-written narratives that explore challenging relationships, this one is worth a listen.
The audiobook enhances the story, drawing you in and making the complexities even more engaging. If you appreciate well-written narratives that explore challenging relationships, this one is worth a listen.
February 19, 2025
Eimear McBride is the most incredible writer. The poetry of her writing and her exploration of narrative styles is just beyond description. The plot didn't completely wow me - but I was completely engrossed in her writing.
September 21, 2024
so beautiful… she’s done it again!
September 7, 2025
Poetic, rhythmic language from the inside of a 19 year-old woman’s mind. The language is wrapped in on itself, reading it feels like reading the thoughts and stories we construct to protect ourselves from the truths we wish were not. In a smaller font we see the glimmers of that truth fighting to the surface as asides and commentary, forcing us to admit its existence while simultaneously denying it the agency of speaking directly. But we cannot live forever in a state of uneasy tension. Truths have a way of expressing themselves, despite our best efforts. As DFW put it, the truth will set you free, but not before it’s done with you.
Eimear McBride captures interiority like no other. The hesitation, the difficulty being truthful, the little games we play with ourselves, the actions we take against our better judgment, the thoughts we wish not to acknowledge, the lack of understanding we have about our own actions. The mind is a multifarious thing, and the magic of this book is the way it captures that complexity and contradiction. Who can name all the things they feel? Who can apply order to feelings half-formed and uninspected? Even if we could would we be “correct”? Or would we be creating a story to fit a feeling that can’t be explained?
As a start, we can explore and try to understand our pasts as a means to understanding our presents, going deeper and deeper into our psyches to explore our most ingrained belief systems and programming. This is what McBride does with Stephen, whose interest in a woman half his age is explored in depth in the first 2/3rds of the book, through a series of flashbacks to earlier phases of his relationship with Eily, the 19 year old woman with whom he is in a long-term relationship. We see the intensity of their early love, broken up by an impenetrably silent now, with traumas alluded to but not named. What has caused this state of affairs? Over the course of the book, we find one source of division: Stephen’s 18 year-old daughter, Grace. It escapes no one’s attention that she is almost the same age as Eily.
At this point I should mention that this book is a sequel to the Lesser Bohemians, which came out roughly a decade ago. That book tells the story of Eily and Stephen meeting and falling for each other, and is a maelstrom of self-hatred, trauma, and passion that leads to an uneasy but genuine love between two people escaping from black holes of pain. The age gap is a central theme of that book, and here it is complicated by the emergence of Grace. This is presented as the first crisis in the novel, and we see how Eily deals with the queer jealousy of a girlfriend about a daughter, magnified by their proximity in age. We see her fight with herself to accept Grace, how she still feels jealousy, but summons her better angels (or fails to) to try to build a relationship with her. McBride excels at capturing the internal battles we fight to be good people, the difficulty of choosing conciliatory words and ignoring the impulse to belittle, mock, and scorn those we are battling in our minds. Even when we choose the right words, they must be spoken by unruly tongues controlled by insubordinate brains, and stand a chance of meaning the opposite of what they say.
As Eily makes her peace with Grace, we enter the second act, a viewing of an autobiographical film by Stephen by Eily and Grace. Here we see Stephen’s shameful past, the past he tried to keep hidden from Grace, the past he tried outrunning, but never could. As with Eily, the truth stalks Stephen, in this case, as a young man fucking, snorting, and shooting up his way through 70s London. The film is effective, both on its own merits as a film that I wouldn’t mind seeing in the real world, and as a primer on Stephen’s traumas. It’s through the catharsis of this shared viewing that Stephen, Eily, and Grace are able to create the balance they need to peacefully coexist.
That brings us back to the present row. We still don’t understand why Eily has withdrawn from the relationship, now that we know that it isn’t due to Grace. In the final act, we see the consequences of Eily’s youthful lack of self-knowledge, and her process of discovering how to be who she wants to be. This is the most effective part of the book, and the emotions it conjures make the earlier disagreements feel like a distant memory. It’s where we (and Eily) see a path forward, because love isn’t a game of trauma trumps, and relationships can’t survive on silent sympathy. They need nourishment, in the form of communication, and passion unblocked by walls of silent misunderstanding.
Eimear McBride captures interiority like no other. The hesitation, the difficulty being truthful, the little games we play with ourselves, the actions we take against our better judgment, the thoughts we wish not to acknowledge, the lack of understanding we have about our own actions. The mind is a multifarious thing, and the magic of this book is the way it captures that complexity and contradiction. Who can name all the things they feel? Who can apply order to feelings half-formed and uninspected? Even if we could would we be “correct”? Or would we be creating a story to fit a feeling that can’t be explained?
As a start, we can explore and try to understand our pasts as a means to understanding our presents, going deeper and deeper into our psyches to explore our most ingrained belief systems and programming. This is what McBride does with Stephen, whose interest in a woman half his age is explored in depth in the first 2/3rds of the book, through a series of flashbacks to earlier phases of his relationship with Eily, the 19 year old woman with whom he is in a long-term relationship. We see the intensity of their early love, broken up by an impenetrably silent now, with traumas alluded to but not named. What has caused this state of affairs? Over the course of the book, we find one source of division: Stephen’s 18 year-old daughter, Grace. It escapes no one’s attention that she is almost the same age as Eily.
At this point I should mention that this book is a sequel to the Lesser Bohemians, which came out roughly a decade ago. That book tells the story of Eily and Stephen meeting and falling for each other, and is a maelstrom of self-hatred, trauma, and passion that leads to an uneasy but genuine love between two people escaping from black holes of pain. The age gap is a central theme of that book, and here it is complicated by the emergence of Grace. This is presented as the first crisis in the novel, and we see how Eily deals with the queer jealousy of a girlfriend about a daughter, magnified by their proximity in age. We see her fight with herself to accept Grace, how she still feels jealousy, but summons her better angels (or fails to) to try to build a relationship with her. McBride excels at capturing the internal battles we fight to be good people, the difficulty of choosing conciliatory words and ignoring the impulse to belittle, mock, and scorn those we are battling in our minds. Even when we choose the right words, they must be spoken by unruly tongues controlled by insubordinate brains, and stand a chance of meaning the opposite of what they say.
As Eily makes her peace with Grace, we enter the second act, a viewing of an autobiographical film by Stephen by Eily and Grace. Here we see Stephen’s shameful past, the past he tried to keep hidden from Grace, the past he tried outrunning, but never could. As with Eily, the truth stalks Stephen, in this case, as a young man fucking, snorting, and shooting up his way through 70s London. The film is effective, both on its own merits as a film that I wouldn’t mind seeing in the real world, and as a primer on Stephen’s traumas. It’s through the catharsis of this shared viewing that Stephen, Eily, and Grace are able to create the balance they need to peacefully coexist.
That brings us back to the present row. We still don’t understand why Eily has withdrawn from the relationship, now that we know that it isn’t due to Grace. In the final act, we see the consequences of Eily’s youthful lack of self-knowledge, and her process of discovering how to be who she wants to be. This is the most effective part of the book, and the emotions it conjures make the earlier disagreements feel like a distant memory. It’s where we (and Eily) see a path forward, because love isn’t a game of trauma trumps, and relationships can’t survive on silent sympathy. They need nourishment, in the form of communication, and passion unblocked by walls of silent misunderstanding.
September 1, 2025
Beautiful cover. I open the book and to my surprise: Poetry! Okay, yes this is a nice introduction to the story :)
Next page, still poetry. No way this book is all in verse. Staccato at that. I hate staccato and I’m sorry I’m speaking like it now.
I have to admit, I was scared of 300 pages of poetry, assuming it would become annoying and make reading more of a task than it should be. But I found that reading aloud was very rewarding, I could hear the rhymes and flourishes so clearly and sometimes while reading in my head, it was easy to forget it was poetry and fall into a zone. But fall into too much of a zone and many of these paragraphs can seem like nothing to the memory. The metaphors and lyricism making me question if what I read was just ambiguous feeling. Had I missed something plot pushing or real? No, I’m not mistaken, it’s just poetry. Or yes, there’s a hidden incident. For this reason alone, I deduct a star.
The setting of London and the characters within a toxic age-gap relationship was perfect. The story weaves in and out of the present and past as we are slowly fed the reasonings and build up for the events of the now. It details a troubled human condition: pain, guilt, hiding and healing.
Have you had a partner or friend who has been through traumatic experiences beyond your imagination? The empathy you feel.
And have you felt an unexplainable depression?
Maybe it feels so stupid compared to what they’ve been through, might aswell not even talk about it. It’s nothing.
But pain is pain. And there is growth and healing in being open.
Some trigger warnings could have been included.
I can’t believe I’m only just finding out that this is a sequel. (Face-palm).
Next page, still poetry. No way this book is all in verse. Staccato at that. I hate staccato and I’m sorry I’m speaking like it now.
I have to admit, I was scared of 300 pages of poetry, assuming it would become annoying and make reading more of a task than it should be. But I found that reading aloud was very rewarding, I could hear the rhymes and flourishes so clearly and sometimes while reading in my head, it was easy to forget it was poetry and fall into a zone. But fall into too much of a zone and many of these paragraphs can seem like nothing to the memory. The metaphors and lyricism making me question if what I read was just ambiguous feeling. Had I missed something plot pushing or real? No, I’m not mistaken, it’s just poetry. Or yes, there’s a hidden incident. For this reason alone, I deduct a star.
The setting of London and the characters within a toxic age-gap relationship was perfect. The story weaves in and out of the present and past as we are slowly fed the reasonings and build up for the events of the now. It details a troubled human condition: pain, guilt, hiding and healing.
Have you had a partner or friend who has been through traumatic experiences beyond your imagination? The empathy you feel.
And have you felt an unexplainable depression?
Maybe it feels so stupid compared to what they’ve been through, might aswell not even talk about it. It’s nothing.
But pain is pain. And there is growth and healing in being open.
Some trigger warnings could have been included.
I can’t believe I’m only just finding out that this is a sequel. (Face-palm).
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