Lazy City

A woman unmoored by grief stumbles through her next steps in Connolly’s perceptive debut. Erin has returned to Belfast after withdrawing from her London graduate program following the death of her close friend Kate at the university. She now works as a nanny and spends her free time drinking with her friend Declan and popping into churches to pray, casting about for something to make her life feel coherent like it used to. In this haze, she pursues casual sex with two men, a former local fling and an American professor harboring pretensions of writing a novel about the city. The plot glides through Erin’s conversations and encounters with both men while slowly revealing the details of Kate’s death and other painful moments from Erin’s life, such as her mother’s explosive anger and physical abuse when she was a child. Now, Erin’s mother insists that what she’s going through is heavier than her mother’s lingering feelings over a brother lost decades earlier in the Troubles. While the story is slow-moving and a bit unresolved, Connolly draws the reader along by making each well-honed scene reverberate with emotion. This thoughtful character portrait is worth a look. (Oct.)