Sex and the city

The couple from The Lesser Bohemians make a return in this brilliantly innovative tale of two lovers and their life in London

Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Eimear McBride does extraordinary things with language. The subject matter of her fiction, from A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing onwards, is transgressive. In 2016’s The Lesser Bohemians and in this new novel, not so much a sequel as a variation, she writes about incestuous child abuse, self-harm, suicide, heroin addiction, a miscarriage deliberately induced by rough penetrative sex, and about lots of other sex between a couple whose ages (she’s not yet 20, he’s nearly 40) are likely to give modern readers pause. But what is most startling about McBride’s work is not its dark material, but the way she breaks every rule in the grammar book and gleefully gets away with it. The City Changes Its Face has a doubled and entwined time scheme. It is the 1990s,…

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Guardian Weekly (Digital) - 1 Issue, 7 February 2025

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