Ordinary Human Failings

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2024.

A Highly Anticipated Novel of 2023 in The Times, i-D, Esquire and the Guardian.

When we look beyond the headlines, everyone has a story to tell

It's 1990 in London and Tom Hargreaves 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, otherworldly, 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.

©2023 Megan Nolan (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

  • Megan Nolan’s debut novel saw her grouped with other Irish millennial women such as Sally Rooney and Naoise Dolan. But with her ambitious and insightful second novel, Ordinary Human Failings, Nolan makes it clear she is not a manifestation of a type, but rather a writer to be read on her own terms

    Financial Times

  • One masterful novel… Nolan has excelled herself: Ordinary Human Failings is a raw, pulsing thing… A writer who’s still at the start of what promises to be a splendid career. Ordinary Human Failings is a bold and beautiful second novel… daring in all the right ways, but compassionate when it needs to be

    Daily Telegraph

  • There is something wonderfully ordinary about this book… Nolan has set out to make a plain three-legged stool rather than an ornate grandfather clock. The corridors of contemporary literature are stuffed with grandfather clocks with faulty mechanisms. How much more valuable is this modest, well-made thing

    Sunday Times

  • As much of a compulsive read as the first novel

    The Times

  • A subtle, accomplished and lyrical study of familial and intergenerational despair, a quiet book about quiet lives… An excellent novel: politically astute, furious and compassionate… A genuine achievement

    Guardian

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