*A NEW STATESMAN, OBSERVER, IRISH TIMES, i, SPECTATOR AND STYLIST BOOK OF 2021*
"Megan Nolan is a huge literary talent, and her first novel is a love story like no other." -- Karl Ove Knausgaard
'Such brilliant writing about female desire... honest and visceral' Marian Keyes
Discover this bitingly honest, darkly funny debut novel about a toxic relationship and secret female desire, from an emerging star of Irish literature.
Love was the final consolation, would set ablaze the fields of my life in one go, leaving nothing behind. I thought of it as a force which would clean me and by its presence make me worthy of it. There was no religion in my life after early childhood, and a great faith in love was what I had cultivated instead. Oh, don't laugh at me for this, for being a woman who says this to you. I hear myself speak.
Even now, even after all that took place between us, I can still feel how moved I am by him. Ciaran was that downy, darkening blond of a baby just leaving its infancy. He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. None of it mattered in the end; what he looked like, who he was, the things he would do to me. To make a beautiful man love and live with me had seemed - obviously, intuitively - the entire point of life. My need was greater than reality, stronger than the truth, more savage than either of us would eventually bear. How could it be true that a woman like me could need a man's love to feel like a person, to feel that I was worthy of life? And what would happen when I finally wore him down and took it?
Please believe the hype . . . Nolan's book describes a very particular experience and it does so with rare intelligence and courage . . . [Her] headlong, fearless prose feels like salt wind on cracked lips. You wince and you thrill. ― Sunday Times
Deeply felt and seriously, spikily intelligent . . . The millennial author everyone should be watching right now. ― Daily Telegraph
Tapping into the zeitgeist comes one of the books of 2021: Megan Nolan's Acts of Desperation . . . a heartbreaking-but-resonating portrait of one woman's savage mistreatment of herself in the name of love. ― Stylist
There is so much to admire in this extremely impressive first novel, which captures an intense experience with clarity and style. It is fully itself, and flawless in its way. ― Guardian
Nigh-on impossible not to devour. ― Daily Mail
[A] fearless debut . . . Amusing, relatable, crushing . . . Nolan's gutsiest achievement is reclaiming the female experience of love and desire in all its shades from lighter literature, making of it something frequently unpretty yet intensely vital. ― Observer
Oh my god! Such brilliant writing about female desire, co-dependant love, the ownership that's taken of female bodies and how it corrupts our relationship to them. I identified hugely. Incredibly honest and visceral. -- Marian Keyes
It's impossible to tear yourself away . . . This is more than simple victimhood. This is a hard frank look at something uglier and more discomforting . . . I couldn't stop reading Acts of Desperation. ― The Times
A mesmerising debut that is a masterpiece from the opening sentence to the bitter end, and everything in between. ― Independent *5 new books to read in lockdown*
I loved this book . . . It triumphs because it takes a risk . . . We find ourselves hurtling towards an ending that is surprising, satisfying, subversive . . . Deeply affecting. ― Irish Independent
Nolan's raw and uncannily insightful writing glimmers in a way that will shed new light onto wounds both healed and open ― New York Times
Acts of Desperation . . . ruthlessly peels back the ego to expose the soul's most discomfiting corners . . . [and] illuminates the fragile tension between power and desire. ― Evening Standard
Nolan's writing gleams with dark precision . . . What Acts of Desperation illuminates best is the chasm, sadly still enormous, between feminist politics and personal predicaments of love, sex and romance. ― Los Angeles Times
This is an incredible debut . . . Poignant, poetic, raw and utterly unique - I couldn't stop reading. Pre-order it now. -- Pandora Sykes
