When I was plotting my books for Reading Ireland Month, I’d intended to start with the McBride that I had in my TBR stack, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing – didn’t quite work out that way, and I’ve opened my McBride account with her second novel. The Schofield has been in my reading stack for years (I think first recommended by Kim at Reading Matters).

The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride

On paper, a simple story but as the initially unnamed characters’ histories are revealed, the complexities of their situation emerge.

McBride’s prose is something to behold – Shakespearean in tone (which also lends itself to the character of the drama student) and, if read aloud, the sentences unfurl like a sonnet. There’s a rhythm and cadence that requires the reader’s focus and as a result, The Lesser Bohemians isn’t necessarily ‘easy’ reading.

And the fall that was coming has come here now. We welcome it. Leap down into it. Cannot wait to see how far.

The prose also does something else – it takes the edges off the violence in the story, and casts the sex scenes (there are lots) through a soft-focus lens.

So take him down into me on the bed. Give and offer what shelter I have. At first we are only people in love, reducing all life to the measure between us. But others pass into. Lives break through, making him go elsewhere…

But for all the pretty words, the uncomfortable truth of the story – a 17 year-old girl is in a relationship with a 38 year-old man who has a traumatic history – sits front and centre, and the power imbalance can’t be ignored.

Just dandelion leaves trod all down his path with this going away and the coming back. Some great ending it feels like. For now though, just go through his broke door.

3.5/5

Martin John by Anakana Schofield

Unnerving. Creepy. I did not enjoy one word of this story BUT the writing is extraordinary. Can’t recall the last time a book had me feeling so relentlessly uncomfortable. Don’t know who to recommend it to… Proceed with caution… Know you’ll feel the need for a shower after reading…

…and drape his leg out so that, for a bitter fraction of a second, before she registers it, his leg will touch hers. Whoever she is. That’s it, that’s all he wants. Just to smear along her. A light buttering. A smudge. Or at least that’s where it starts. Then inevitably he becomes greedy.

4/5