Megan Nolan

Megan Nolan is the author of Acts of Desperation, her debut, which was the fiction book of the year for many of our booksellers in 2021. It landed her a Betty Trask Award, was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize.

Her new novel, Ordinary Human Failings, has already been named one of the Best Books of 2023 in The Times, Sunday Times, i-D, the Guardian.

When we look beyond the headlines, everyone has a story to tell

It's 1990 in London and Tom Hargreaves has it all: a burgeoning career as a reporter, fierce ambition and a brisk disregard for the 'peasants' - ordinary people, his readers, easy tabloid fodder. His star looks set to rise when he stumbles across a scoop: a dead child on a London estate, grieving parents loved across the neighbourhood, and the finger of suspicion pointing at one reclusive family of Irish immigrants and 'bad apples': the Greens.

At their heart sits Carmel: beautiful, other-worldly, broken, and once destined for a future beyond her circumstances until life - and love - got in her way. Crushed by failure and surrounded by disappointment, there's nowhere for her to go and no chance of escape. Now, with the police closing in on a suspect and the tabloids hunting their monster, she must confront the secrets and silences that have trapped her family for so many generations.

"A huge literary talent" ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of My Struggle