Ordinary Human Failings

Irish author Nolan (Acts of Desperation) delivers an insightful if lugubrious tale of a family under suspicion for a neighbor girl’s murder. Carmel Green, a young unwed Irish mother in 1990 England, once believed she was “destined for special things.” Now, feeling painfully ordinary, she mourns her faded promise. Carmel and her 10-year-old daughter, Lucy, live with Carmel’s father and brother, both of whom are alcoholics. Her mother, an affable woman who held the family together, died two years ago. Nolan alternates perspectives between the four Greens and Tom, an ambitious newspaper reporter who becomes interested in the family when their three-year-old neighbor is strangled to death, and suspicion falls on Lucy. After the police take Lucy into custody, Tom sequesters Carmel and the men in a small hotel, where he plies them with alcohol in hopes of getting enough material to write a “major, state-of-the-nation piece” on the family of a child murderess. The Greens’ revelations are by turn ironic and sad. Though the gloomy subject matter makes for rough going, Nolan is a gifted writer, capable of stunningly precise observations. This unflinching tale provokes. (Feb.)