Read an extract from Megan Nolan’s new novel, Ordinary Human Failings

Born in 1990 in Waterford, Megan Nolan’s much talked about debut novel, Acts of Desperation, was published in 2021 and quickly positioned her as the millennial author to watch. Now, her second novel has just been published and is already receiving rave reviews.

Set in London in 1990, the story follows Tom Hargreaves, who has it all: a burgeoning career as a reporter, fierce ambition, and a brisk disregard for the ‘peasants’ – ordinary people, his readers, easy tabloid fodder. His star looks set to rise when he stumbles across a scoop: a dead child on a London estate, grieving parents loved across the neighbourhood, and the finger of suspicion pointing at one reclusive family of Irish immigrants and ‘bad apples’: the Greens.

At their heart sits Carmel: beautiful, other-worldly, broken, and once destined for a future beyond her circumstances until life – and love – got in her way. Crushed by failure and surrounded by disappointment, there’s nowhere for her to go and no chance of escape. Now, with the police closing in on a suspect and the tabloids hunting their monster, she must confront the secrets and silences that have trapped her family for so many generations.

Here, we share an extract from this extraordinary book…

The night the child went missing, Carmel sat a few miles away in the window of a cafe in Brockley. She was breathing hard, cloud on the glass. Passing by, a man glanced in to check her prettiness and was struck by the intensity of her face behind the patch of steam which partially obscured it. She ignored the gentle rattle of plates and hiss of chips which went on behind her, hearing nothing.

When she let herself pore over memories, she was hawkish. Filled with greed for one of the only pleasures remaining to her, raking through lost evenings and moments. It was rare that she did allow herself this. It had been so long that she knew there could only be a handful more times. It would not always be possible to summon precisely the fast-fading textures and tastes. When the child was missing, while the courtyard was lighting up with drama and anguish, Carmel was thinking about sex. She tried to mete out the different encounters they had shared together and not think of them all at once as a conflated interaction, not to waste her thoughts in an incoherent wave. Rather she had separated them out years ago and given them titles and would think of them only with great care. Often, because her and Derek’s affair had taken place almost exclusively in the privacy of his apartment, they were called after things they had consumed together, and which she could then recall the taste of in his mouth.

Particular drinks (White Russian Night), plain meals he had cooked with sweet incompetence (Spaghetti Bolognese Night), takeaway pizza with a faint cardboard flavour (Gino’s Night). Most often what she tasted was the familiar paternal smell of beer and cigarettes on his moustache, a beautiful acrid dream sense which haunted her. Other nights were named after a book he had been reading at the time (Of Human Bondage Night), or a chapter she had been studying (‘Home Rule’ Night). She could see with perfect clarity the books being laid aside when they became too impatient.

The clothes she had worn were another method, to think of him undoing the side clasp of a kilt, or pulling up the snug wool jumper she had stolen from her brother after he had shrunk it in the wash. There were ways to do it, ways to differentiate. Despite what had resulted, and what they had meant for the rest of her life, their nights together had not been so many. They weren’t enough that the ways he touched or looked at her were easily muddled together

Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan is published by Jonathan Cape and is available in shops and online now.