DJ turned novelist Annie Macmanus described her bestselling debut, Mother Mother, as a love letter to Belfast. Her second book, The Mess We’re In, channels an evocative rush of feeling for another capital central to the Irish experience, London. How to go about finding your place within such a city is a question that drives this immersive, music-infused coming-of-age story.
It begins as its narrator, 21-year-old Dubliner Orla, arrives in turn-of-the-millennium London to share a house with her best friend, law student Neema, and the members of Shiva, an up-and-coming band fronted by Neema’s brother. Within the first few chapters, enough pills, tabs and cocaine are consumed to fuel a rave, enabling the housemates to overlook the black mould covering the kitchen and the mice nesting in cereal boxes – but their relationships with one another soon become equally messy.
Orla is an aspiring singer-songwriter, and Macmanus brings an insider’s savvy to her depiction of the industry her heroine must navigate, complete with pre-#MeToo sleaze and misogyny. Complicating Orla’s ambition is the fact that back in Ireland it was her father who got her into music, and now he’s left her mother to start a new family with another woman.
Meanwhile, London entrances even as it overwhelms, and Orla gradually adapts to its rhythm, landing a job at Fahy’s, an Irish pub in Kilburn, where elderly regulars tell tales that gesture to the breadth of the Irish experience.
The Mess We’re In is not always tidy – its dialogue could be crisper in places, and characters too often “deadpan” their lines – but it captures a time and a place with heart and irresistible momentum in prose that can be bracingly lyrical. As Orla notes of one of Fahy’s aged barflies: “He talks like a tin whistle plays, big gusts of melodious words with the odd heave-in of breath, and then he’s off again.”
• The Mess We’re In by Annie Macmanus is published by Wildfire (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
