APR 30 | 6:30pm at McNally Jackson Seaport
Caroline O’Donoghue presents The Rachel Incident
in conversation with Taffy Brodesser-Akner
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A brilliantly funny novel about friends, lovers, Ireland in chaos, and a young woman desperately trying to manage all three.
"If you’ve ever been unsure what to do with your degree in English; if you’ve ever wondered when the rug-buying part of your life will start...if you’ve ever loved the wrong person, or the right person at the wrong time…In short, if you’ve ever been young, you will love The Rachel Incident like I did.” —Gabrielle Zevin, author of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it’s love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them.
When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred’s glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife. Aching with unrequited love, shot through with delicious, sparkling humor, The Rachel Incident is a triumph.
“O'Donoghue deepens the familiar coming-of-age premise with riveting moral complications." —People
Caroline O’Donoghue is a novelist, podcaster and screenwriter. All Our Hidden Gifts, her fantasy series for Young Adults, is a New York Times bestseller and The Rachel Incident is being adapted for television by Universal Studios. Caroline’s podcast Sentimental Garbage charts internationally and has acquired over 9 million downloads worldwide. She was born in Cork, Ireland and currently lives in London.
Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine and the New York Times bestselling author of Fleishman Is in Trouble, which has been translated into more than a dozen languages. She is also the creator and executive producer of its Emmy-nominated limited series adaptation for FX. Long Island Compromise is her second novel.