London has long been both literary character and setting, showing its many different faces in fiction from Oliver Twist to Mrs Dalloway, Zadie Smith’s NW to Andrew O’Hagan’s newly published Caledonian Road. Now Evenings and Weekends, the debut novel from an Irish spoken-word artist and playwright, captures its heady spirit during a heatwave in 2019, giving voice to the dilemmas of 30-year-old Londoners navigating queer identity, financial precarity and emotional commitment.
Set largely over one sweltering June weekend, this vivid realist novel adroitly manoeuvres a sprawling interlocking cast around the hipster haunts of north and east London, including Kingsland Road, London Fields and the Hampstead Heath swimming ponds. Shifting between multiple perspectives, Oisín McKenna interweaves individual and collective experience and anthropomorphises the city as “a body under stress, drenched in sweat and panting”.
