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We Were Young
'Young then. Before Alva and everything.'
Cormac is a photographer. Approaching forty and still single, he suddenly finds himself 'the leftover man'. Through talent and charm, he has escaped small town life and a haunted family. But now his peers are all getting divorced, dying, or buying trampolines in the suburbs. Cormac is dating former students, staying out all night and receiving boilerplate rejection emails for his work, propped up by a constellation of the women and ex-lovers in his life.
In the last weeks of the year, Cormac meets Caroline, an ambitious young dancer, and embarks on a miniature odyssey of intimacy. Simultaneously, he must take responsibility for his married brother, whose mid-life crisis forces them both to reckon with a death in the family that hangs over those left behind.
Set in Dublin, a city built on burial pits, We Were Young is a dazzlingly clever, deeply enjoyable novel from a Sunday Times Short Story Award-Winning author.
Cormac is a photographer. Approaching forty and still single, he suddenly finds himself 'the leftover man'. Through talent and charm, he has escaped small town life and a haunted family. But now his peers are all getting divorced, dying, or buying trampolines in the suburbs. Cormac is dating former students, staying out all night and receiving boilerplate rejection emails for his work, propped up by a constellation of the women and ex-lovers in his life.
In the last weeks of the year, Cormac meets Caroline, an ambitious young dancer, and embarks on a miniature odyssey of intimacy. Simultaneously, he must take responsibility for his married brother, whose mid-life crisis forces them both to reckon with a death in the family that hangs over those left behind.
Set in Dublin, a city built on burial pits, We Were Young is a dazzlingly clever, deeply enjoyable novel from a Sunday Times Short Story Award-Winning author.
288 pages, Paperback
First published February 17, 2022
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1275 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 66 reviews
May 31, 2022
This book was a spontanious buy for me, and so i went into it with no knowledge at all of the author or what i was to expect.
I cant really say it disapointed, but i cant say it was the best book i've ever read. It felt like it had the potential to be Sally Rooney esque, but it just fell short.
We follow Cormac, a Photographer reaching nearly 40 who sort of darts around having sex with former students and doing basically fuck all. I felt that it really lacked any direction other than just Cormac dealing with his own insecurities and following his brother around picking up his broken marriage.
I understood what Campbell was going for, but i think it could have been executed in a much more page turning way. It took me months to finish this which is unusual for me. I felt like i just didn't want to give this book attention, but that i had to keep reading incase it got more interesting.
I cant really say it disapointed, but i cant say it was the best book i've ever read. It felt like it had the potential to be Sally Rooney esque, but it just fell short.
We follow Cormac, a Photographer reaching nearly 40 who sort of darts around having sex with former students and doing basically fuck all. I felt that it really lacked any direction other than just Cormac dealing with his own insecurities and following his brother around picking up his broken marriage.
I understood what Campbell was going for, but i think it could have been executed in a much more page turning way. It took me months to finish this which is unusual for me. I felt like i just didn't want to give this book attention, but that i had to keep reading incase it got more interesting.
August 27, 2022
What an effort. The dialogue bled into the narrative, there are at least 3 women who blur into each other, the main character was infuriating and uninteresting, and at times the author’s poetic style and ordering of words was downright confusing. honestly who cares about a bunch of self-hating (or self-congratulatory) artists approaching middle age and questioning whether they’ve misspent their youth? I couldn’t connect to a single character and was so exhausted by the time I finished reading it took me four days to write this review.
February 23, 2022
great read. Campbell’s novels twine vivid accounts of their subjects’ interiority with accounts of the actual ways in which class operates today, has operated historically, in Ireland with a seriousness and accuracy that no other Irish writer currently living does. the account of Dublin and its suburbs which appears here, how both have changed over the past number of decades is 100% recognisable and rings totally true. frequently hilarious also
July 17, 2022
beautifully poetic throughout but quite boring when caroline wasn’t in a scene. ALSO can we please use quotation marks and why are there only 3 or 4 chapters…
June 3, 2023
4 for the beautifully constructed sentences with perfectly selected words ..
May 4, 2022
I was very torn on how to review this novel as it’s written in a manner that is disorienting the reader. Everything that happens in the protagonists interior and exterior life is described - as it happens - so far so Rooney-esque, except that the prose is incredibly vivid and lyrical and complex and the result is somewhat passive - enter Rachel Cusk style writing. It’s a beautiful novel by a talented writer but it left me somewhat cold.
January 16, 2025
Campbell certainly writes very well - some observations and passages are superb. But the plot lacked direction for me. Maybe that's the point (I don't think that I gave the novel the attention it deserved, you know busy busy), her characters weren't very likeable and for all the occasional insights and wisdom, it seemed, for some, a rather shallow existence.
July 25, 2022
Rogue for my granny to have bought me? Genuinely might be bc sexy man on cover? Lovely n poetic in bits, really try hard in others n the characters didn’t give me much at all soz
October 23, 2023
beautifully and experimentally written, but really no plot, just vibes.
Read
December 9, 2024My misandry was waning but this topped it up (affectionate)
June 20, 2025
Upon my completion of Campbell's 'We Were Young', I was left somewhat disappointed with it's ending. I had initially ascribed only 3 stars to this novel as a result but upon further rumination I truly believe that the ending really fits with the life story of Cormac and who he is as a person. In addition, I think a somewhat inconclusive ending also makes this novel a more of a glimpse into the life of Cormac and some of his past experiences, leaving his future completely to our own imagination.
I also have to truly give high commendation on the wonderful prose within this novel. In particular, as someone who really despises Dublin as a city it really changed my view and opened my mind to the beautiful places within the wider city that I had never considered before, being incredibly blinded by my focus on the city centre.
This novel is definitely a polarising one from reading the reviews. Either people hate it or love it but I recommend for anyone to give it a go if they have the opportunity to do so.
I also have to truly give high commendation on the wonderful prose within this novel. In particular, as someone who really despises Dublin as a city it really changed my view and opened my mind to the beautiful places within the wider city that I had never considered before, being incredibly blinded by my focus on the city centre.
This novel is definitely a polarising one from reading the reviews. Either people hate it or love it but I recommend for anyone to give it a go if they have the opportunity to do so.
October 14, 2022
We're plunged into the world of Cormac Mulvey, a world he feels estranged from. This is beautifully written glimpses into his fleeting love affairs, the artists that make up his social circle, his brother who himself is facing marriage troubles. The novel touches so delicately on all these complicated human relationships and the emotions that surface, or linger beneath surfaces only to find its form in or through art. There's plenty of art in this novel - installations, performance, paintings - that add to this texture of entanglement - of individual and collective experiences that intersect in the making of our personal histories. I think it's for this reason that Campbell does away with quotation marks; so that the voices of every character seamlessly blend together but with enough distinction for the reader to follow who-said-what though it is clearly unimportant. Campbell's skillful treatment of the past, future and present makes for a convincing construction of Cormac's mental life. It's a breath of fresh air to get out of his headspace and into one of his lovers (or ex-lovers?) Nina's in the last pages of the novel, only to realize her own feelings of alienation, the mix of wanting to be seen and needing to carve one's art in seclusion mirrors Cormac's.
This novel puts me in a mood. Each time I put it back on my shelf to tend to other novels for work, I found myself thinking of it again, perhaps because the prose is really so delicious. I think this novel is a mood - it's lonely, nostalgic like the photographs of Harry Gruyaert (its cover page) - and though set in a place entirely foreign to me, I felt it come alive around me so that this loneliness is met also with a sense of familiarity and completeness.
This novel puts me in a mood. Each time I put it back on my shelf to tend to other novels for work, I found myself thinking of it again, perhaps because the prose is really so delicious. I think this novel is a mood - it's lonely, nostalgic like the photographs of Harry Gruyaert (its cover page) - and though set in a place entirely foreign to me, I felt it come alive around me so that this loneliness is met also with a sense of familiarity and completeness.
November 23, 2023
I loved the lack of plot. It flowed freely, from thought to thought, in the absence of a linear timeline. The prose is stunning. The last chapter’s shift in perspective took me by surprise, but it was a fitting final flourish.
February 26, 2025
As others have noted, this felt like Sally Rooney, but worse. I think Campbell tried too hard.
May 1, 2025
We were young? Hell yeah we were, I was 80 years old by the time I finished this. Also, there’s no chapters in this, just one long stream of consciousness; could not tell if this was good or bad for my adhd.
I came to this book in hopes of finding similar material to Sally Rooney but unlike those works, this doesn’t have much direction or goal. Cormac is excessively self-conscious from start to finish, just bobbing around. It’s hard to feel for him when he’s just fucking people and thinking about people he used to fuck. lol.
Not a complete loss though, I found the language hit the mark. I really liked this one, “It is frightening to look into the eyes of a person you have known so intimately when the time, the intimacy, has passed. You don’t see this person but you see yourself as exposed and diminished suddenly.”
Lot of potential here, just didn’t quite make it for me.
I came to this book in hopes of finding similar material to Sally Rooney but unlike those works, this doesn’t have much direction or goal. Cormac is excessively self-conscious from start to finish, just bobbing around. It’s hard to feel for him when he’s just fucking people and thinking about people he used to fuck. lol.
Not a complete loss though, I found the language hit the mark. I really liked this one, “It is frightening to look into the eyes of a person you have known so intimately when the time, the intimacy, has passed. You don’t see this person but you see yourself as exposed and diminished suddenly.”
Lot of potential here, just didn’t quite make it for me.
March 6, 2022
Campbell adds a new twist to the Sally Rooney tropes by (mostly) telling the story from the perspective of a thirty-something man.
March 26, 2022
Beautifully written and tightly paced, despite the relative plotlessness. Cormac’s personal history is drawn with such detail and specificity that he and the Dublin he inhabits feel completely recognisable. The writing is occasionally quite dense and takes some unexpected detours, but for me anyway, it managed to sustain a base level of empathy for its protagonist, even when his actions become increasingly exasperating. I imagine non-Irish readers might find some of the scene-setting a little elusive, but as a portrait of someone who is completely lost within themselves, I thought this was pretty remarkable.
December 11, 2022
Niamh Campbell is gonna be huge, at least for people who don't buy popular breezy novels with pink covers and florid recommendations- she's smallish canvas; forensic; a human condition encapsulating sort of writer interested in sub text; back stories and what motivates people to live their lives.She also loves milieus and describing in wonderful prose settings and situations.. This Happy, her first novel was wonderfully well written and I gave it a glowing 5 star review. What does one do when you have written a brilliant first novel. How do you follow it? More of the same maybe? Campbell has tried to move on, a little at least. Her protagonist is male, Cormac, and its a clever decision to make him a photographer- which means he roams like a camera observing; maybe judging and paying attention to the people he's with and the internal landscapes of houses; galleries; bars(around Dublin chiefly) but also keeps a distance, wandering and curious. Cormac is described by another character as "lost" and seems to have the usual key one failed relationship that has unnerved him to the quick- thus any other encounters with women are with that baggage. The novel describes his wanderings and relationships, overlayed with the failure of his brothers marriage and the mention of another brother who died. Cormac is bi-sexual which adds another layer.
Hence we meet Alice ( a long term trusted friend) Nina; an artist who Campbell tries to flesh out as a more significant character and Caroline, an actress that initially draws cormacs interest. this novel riffs rather too accurately on the nature of life lived in solitary mode Characters (Nina for example) seem to have imposter syndrome and Cormac indeed appears to be a commitment phobic. There is no plot ( a mode also employed in This Happy) so Campbell has to be successful with the characters and to a large degree she succeeds though a resolution seems to be something Campbell struggled with. For elegiac prose and slow burn atmosphere Campbell is increasingly the daddy- Im fascinated to see where she goes next having got that difficult second novel out of her system.
Hence we meet Alice ( a long term trusted friend) Nina; an artist who Campbell tries to flesh out as a more significant character and Caroline, an actress that initially draws cormacs interest. this novel riffs rather too accurately on the nature of life lived in solitary mode Characters (Nina for example) seem to have imposter syndrome and Cormac indeed appears to be a commitment phobic. There is no plot ( a mode also employed in This Happy) so Campbell has to be successful with the characters and to a large degree she succeeds though a resolution seems to be something Campbell struggled with. For elegiac prose and slow burn atmosphere Campbell is increasingly the daddy- Im fascinated to see where she goes next having got that difficult second novel out of her system.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 12, 2025
DNF - some of the prose was beautiful, but found it to be quite boring. I usually love books that are more character driven and less focused on plot, but I couldn’t connect to any of the characters and they felt quite flat to me. Would give other books by the author a chance as she does have a lovely writing style, very sally rooney, but unfortunately this book wasn’t for me.
March 24, 2024
Prettily written and plotless.
July 23, 2024
It had all the ingredients to be one of my favourite books, but it fell flat.
September 27, 2024
Trying to read this on holiday and I can’t get into it so it’s been abandoned.
August 1, 2023
4.5
if you've ever just got so sick of a male writer/artist/photographer/etc. for being non-committal, self-involved, condescending, or for just giving that Special Male Artist ick, this is very enjoyable. campbell's writing is, as always, incredibly gorgeous and worth reading just from an appreciative standpoint. (trigger warning: having to deal with stuck-up photographers)
spoilers: it really explores that personality type very well and makes the protagonist sympathetic while bringing it together at the end to show, yes, he is THAT guy. he is the guy who thinks it's perfectly normal and healthy to sleep with another woman (much younger than him, of course) while convinced that it's time to court another woman he's been leading on. he sees the vapidness and self-serious, artistic nonsense in other people but not himself. he's critical of his brother for writing a weepy memoir because he finds it poorly done, but is getting his photography rejected by publications and drowning in his general feelings of mediocrity.
as said, he is sympathetic, as campbell does know how to really sweetly depict an appreciation for people without pulling punches on their likeability (or lack thereof). after spending nearly every interaction just thinking about himself and his own past (a tendency which, while done with purpose, does inherently make the pacing a bit slow and is responsible for knocking off half a star), he experiences some subtle burst of character growth/an epiphany where he realises some of his actual flaws, as opposed to waxing on about what he THINKS his flaws are.
double spoiler, the novel also ends from the female perspective of the main woman he's been leading on, and i loved this. it very accurately conveys the weird mixture of companionship and isolation artists experience, and it gives women generally the humanisation in the narrative that they deserve, which Cormac had refused to give them.
overall, i really enjoyed this book and think the archetypes and very common tropes of the world of the arts were explored in a self-aware, nuanced manner. if you don't know anything or care about the arts, or are a very sensitive man, do not read this. or maybe do. might benefit you.
if you've ever just got so sick of a male writer/artist/photographer/etc. for being non-committal, self-involved, condescending, or for just giving that Special Male Artist ick, this is very enjoyable. campbell's writing is, as always, incredibly gorgeous and worth reading just from an appreciative standpoint. (trigger warning: having to deal with stuck-up photographers)
spoilers: it really explores that personality type very well and makes the protagonist sympathetic while bringing it together at the end to show, yes, he is THAT guy. he is the guy who thinks it's perfectly normal and healthy to sleep with another woman (much younger than him, of course) while convinced that it's time to court another woman he's been leading on. he sees the vapidness and self-serious, artistic nonsense in other people but not himself. he's critical of his brother for writing a weepy memoir because he finds it poorly done, but is getting his photography rejected by publications and drowning in his general feelings of mediocrity.
as said, he is sympathetic, as campbell does know how to really sweetly depict an appreciation for people without pulling punches on their likeability (or lack thereof). after spending nearly every interaction just thinking about himself and his own past (a tendency which, while done with purpose, does inherently make the pacing a bit slow and is responsible for knocking off half a star), he experiences some subtle burst of character growth/an epiphany where he realises some of his actual flaws, as opposed to waxing on about what he THINKS his flaws are.
double spoiler, the novel also ends from the female perspective of the main woman he's been leading on, and i loved this. it very accurately conveys the weird mixture of companionship and isolation artists experience, and it gives women generally the humanisation in the narrative that they deserve, which Cormac had refused to give them.
overall, i really enjoyed this book and think the archetypes and very common tropes of the world of the arts were explored in a self-aware, nuanced manner. if you don't know anything or care about the arts, or are a very sensitive man, do not read this. or maybe do. might benefit you.
January 8, 2024
I guess what really pushed this from 3 to 4 stars is that I actually found myself enjoying it. I really resonated with Cormac's cynical, dry humour and the existential way his character rolls through life. The text is a bit deadpan, especially with the lack of punctuation, but once I adjusted it really matched his personality. Also as an Irish, struggling middle class involved with the creative industry-this book fits.
For a female writer she really captures the male gaze, but also how a man never really grows up-he is always the same greedy, lustful, selfish boy. At times I really disliked his character, other times gloating in his honesty-the clean cut perception and the lack of sugar coating.
I think exactly like he does but even still, in my female outrage, you feel a small bit disgusted when the male psyche is revealed to be just as expected. He is definitely mentally ill though, everything is tinged with negativity or skewed to seeing others in the worst possible light, always perceiving their flaws.
Although the plot isn't really exciting, I enjoyed the lazy everydayness and reality of it. Also his observational skills (I'd say more like hyperawareness or overstimulation) is making we wonder is he potentially autistic? This would also explain some of his relationship and self-identity issues. His unresolved childhood trauma is constantly insinuated by the overzealous nostalgia throughout-is this a normal experience it asks the reader, or just a traumatic one? Maybe even an artistic one?
Finally, the female characters are bland, distant and vague to the reader, but I feel like this was done deliberately. It's Cormac's world and we are reading it.
For a female writer she really captures the male gaze, but also how a man never really grows up-he is always the same greedy, lustful, selfish boy. At times I really disliked his character, other times gloating in his honesty-the clean cut perception and the lack of sugar coating.
I think exactly like he does but even still, in my female outrage, you feel a small bit disgusted when the male psyche is revealed to be just as expected. He is definitely mentally ill though, everything is tinged with negativity or skewed to seeing others in the worst possible light, always perceiving their flaws.
Although the plot isn't really exciting, I enjoyed the lazy everydayness and reality of it. Also his observational skills (I'd say more like hyperawareness or overstimulation) is making we wonder is he potentially autistic? This would also explain some of his relationship and self-identity issues. His unresolved childhood trauma is constantly insinuated by the overzealous nostalgia throughout-is this a normal experience it asks the reader, or just a traumatic one? Maybe even an artistic one?
Finally, the female characters are bland, distant and vague to the reader, but I feel like this was done deliberately. It's Cormac's world and we are reading it.
February 4, 2025
The editor struck him as tenderly English in that minute, English like the foolish-seeming flatness of farmland when you leave St Pancras, in a northerly directly, by train; English like all shall be well and all shall be well; English like a chapel in Surrey he saw with wooden saints...
It smelled, after the fried-doughnut dryness of London, like chemical fertiliser.
...lush crunch of winkles underfoot.
You were never here, Patrick shot, although this had nothing to do with anything.
over the thin but diligent Camac
This is brand Ireland.
full-stomached anticipation
He feels there is a brittle lability to the moods of women and it functions defensively. Behind a sudden brightness, they sit watchful as a creature in a shell.
In the lean light of Sunday afternoon
She has never said artist because that is a term without a stable referent.
the cartography of ritual. ... Sealing out chaos with elegant and repetitive action...
her body slack and decanted
he thinks clearly, slow enough to perform disgust and witness himself performing disgust even though this is taking place inside his head...
gulls like mortar fire
a Dub-a-lin accent
noctilucent
lit from within by some tenacious filament, the kind of thing extinguished in an instant
She pauses for a cruel, dilatory time
Alice understood too well to really receive Cormac's iteration of this feeling and make a small room out of it, hospitably.
The volubility, it seems, signals contentment. The silence is unhappiness.
strata of reality
Vigorous chilly sun
lassitude
troubled welter of lust
manuals that had become limp as butter pats with disuse
Maude's little duck-down head
Detachment, a familiar mechanism, dissolved and settled in him like seltzer.
He's the nicest thing about you.
that American inflection which is in fact just an accident of nerves.
savage in its accuracy
She leaves the room like all well-bred and beautiful women leave the room: apologetically.
sear of winter sunlight
epigenetic emboss
Some bonny, mindless, clannish kid of life. Not she: suburban, nervy.
Nobody has wanted to treat her as anything other than fun.
antic and antsy
The silence of her phone was a viral load.
The woman lifts her skirt to reveal wellies
desultory
emotional omerta
It smelled, after the fried-doughnut dryness of London, like chemical fertiliser.
...lush crunch of winkles underfoot.
You were never here, Patrick shot, although this had nothing to do with anything.
over the thin but diligent Camac
This is brand Ireland.
full-stomached anticipation
He feels there is a brittle lability to the moods of women and it functions defensively. Behind a sudden brightness, they sit watchful as a creature in a shell.
In the lean light of Sunday afternoon
She has never said artist because that is a term without a stable referent.
the cartography of ritual. ... Sealing out chaos with elegant and repetitive action...
her body slack and decanted
he thinks clearly, slow enough to perform disgust and witness himself performing disgust even though this is taking place inside his head...
gulls like mortar fire
a Dub-a-lin accent
noctilucent
lit from within by some tenacious filament, the kind of thing extinguished in an instant
She pauses for a cruel, dilatory time
Alice understood too well to really receive Cormac's iteration of this feeling and make a small room out of it, hospitably.
The volubility, it seems, signals contentment. The silence is unhappiness.
strata of reality
Vigorous chilly sun
lassitude
troubled welter of lust
manuals that had become limp as butter pats with disuse
Maude's little duck-down head
Detachment, a familiar mechanism, dissolved and settled in him like seltzer.
He's the nicest thing about you.
that American inflection which is in fact just an accident of nerves.
savage in its accuracy
She leaves the room like all well-bred and beautiful women leave the room: apologetically.
sear of winter sunlight
epigenetic emboss
Some bonny, mindless, clannish kid of life. Not she: suburban, nervy.
Nobody has wanted to treat her as anything other than fun.
antic and antsy
The silence of her phone was a viral load.
The woman lifts her skirt to reveal wellies
desultory
emotional omerta
May 12, 2024
“It is frightening to look into the eyes of a person who you have known so intimately when the time, the intimacy has passed. You don’t see this person but you see yourself as exposed and diminished suddenly.”
There is something about the style of certain Irish authors that makes even the most mundane parts of life sound so filled with colour and purpose, it must be something in the water over there. Campbell does a very successful job at portraying complex characters who, despite their flaws, you can’t help but feel bad for. My personal opinions are as follows:
Nina is the person people think Marianne from Normal People is. She was mothering from start to finish and did not take shit from anybody (you go girl)!!
Senan, you deserve the world my sweet angel, I’m free on Thursdays if you’re free on Thursdays !
Cormac, you can’t use the excuse of being “young and dumb” for mistakes you made five minutes ago, especially not at the age of 37. Also, not to sound like a bully but when you staged an intervention for your brother and your response to the question “what has caused all this” was “you”, look in the mirror. I’m your biggest opposition and I need you to know that.
(also these opinions are not at all biased by personal preferences or gender affiliation, shut up.)
There is something about the style of certain Irish authors that makes even the most mundane parts of life sound so filled with colour and purpose, it must be something in the water over there. Campbell does a very successful job at portraying complex characters who, despite their flaws, you can’t help but feel bad for. My personal opinions are as follows:
Nina is the person people think Marianne from Normal People is. She was mothering from start to finish and did not take shit from anybody (you go girl)!!
Senan, you deserve the world my sweet angel, I’m free on Thursdays if you’re free on Thursdays !
Cormac, you can’t use the excuse of being “young and dumb” for mistakes you made five minutes ago, especially not at the age of 37. Also, not to sound like a bully but when you staged an intervention for your brother and your response to the question “what has caused all this” was “you”, look in the mirror. I’m your biggest opposition and I need you to know that.
(also these opinions are not at all biased by personal preferences or gender affiliation, shut up.)
January 26, 2023
The format of this novel reads as if we are accompanying the late 30's photographer Cormac through a period of his life in Dublin. This journey involves him in various relationships which include those with lovers new and old as well as his troubled family and his friends.
i found the way he treated the two women who he has a sexual relationship with troubling as seems oblivious to their feelings and we learn in the narrative how these women feel and more about them rather than their being treated as a device for Cormac's apparent emotional immaturity.
Hi family , and particularly his brother Patrick, is complicated by historic bereavements and by his siblings apparent intent to self destruct.
I put the book down impressed by the authors prose and having found the story interesting albeit extremely frustrated by the main character. This is definitely an author I will read again.
i found the way he treated the two women who he has a sexual relationship with troubling as seems oblivious to their feelings and we learn in the narrative how these women feel and more about them rather than their being treated as a device for Cormac's apparent emotional immaturity.
Hi family , and particularly his brother Patrick, is complicated by historic bereavements and by his siblings apparent intent to self destruct.
I put the book down impressed by the authors prose and having found the story interesting albeit extremely frustrated by the main character. This is definitely an author I will read again.
February 9, 2025
I hate criticising books because I so admire anyone who can dedicate themselves to this craft. And I did enjoy some of this - there were some beautiful descriptions (I loved the sea being described as a ‘curdle of commas’ seen from a plane). However, the lack of speech marks made the text very hard to follow, and I really struggled to know what was going on and whether it was past or present. I couldn’t distinguish one girlfriend from another, nor connect to any of the characters. Ultimately I did not care for anyone - I just wasn’t invested in them. Such a shame as I usually love Irish writers! This had no plot at all, not even a smidgen - once Cormac met Caroline there was nothing to keep my interest. I really wanted to like this book more than I did, but at the halfway mark I had to force myself to finish it.
February 22, 2025
This gets four stars purely for the exquisite writing. The sentence structure and poetic prose stopped me regularly, just to read them again. The story itself was more of a snapshot of a space in time - contemporary though it may be - but I believe the writing will entice future readers to not forget this book.
Cormac is a flawed and jaded man; confident in his own skin as only one who is lusted after can ever truly be. There seem to be women orbiting him. Which brings me to my only criticism of the writing itself - they all kind of blend into one another without enough time given to them to make them stand alone. Even the lack of quotation marks doesn’t bother me. Do I recommend this book? Yes, if only to marvel at the architecture of the sentences and the beautiful, bold choice of words.
Cormac is a flawed and jaded man; confident in his own skin as only one who is lusted after can ever truly be. There seem to be women orbiting him. Which brings me to my only criticism of the writing itself - they all kind of blend into one another without enough time given to them to make them stand alone. Even the lack of quotation marks doesn’t bother me. Do I recommend this book? Yes, if only to marvel at the architecture of the sentences and the beautiful, bold choice of words.
August 23, 2023
well, if you like an adverb in every paragraph, Niamh Campbell is for you!
might just be a me thing but how can someone “honk their horn endearingly” 😭😭
gahhhh i wanted to like this so much, there’s absolutely a literary quality there but it just felt like the majority of the book was just the author trying to show off her vocabulary. i gave up around page 75. the story itself wasn’t really captivating at all - it’s basically about a photographer who’s a narcissist who just sleeps around and sees women as expendable.
if she wrote poetry, i’d probably be all over it! but no, not really for me. just felt like way too much. since i didn’t finish i can’t really rate BUT at least the cover was gorgeous 🤷🏻♀️
might just be a me thing but how can someone “honk their horn endearingly” 😭😭
gahhhh i wanted to like this so much, there’s absolutely a literary quality there but it just felt like the majority of the book was just the author trying to show off her vocabulary. i gave up around page 75. the story itself wasn’t really captivating at all - it’s basically about a photographer who’s a narcissist who just sleeps around and sees women as expendable.
if she wrote poetry, i’d probably be all over it! but no, not really for me. just felt like way too much. since i didn’t finish i can’t really rate BUT at least the cover was gorgeous 🤷🏻♀️
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