Affair between drama student and an older actor will feature in The Lesser Bohemians, due from Faber next autumn following award-winner A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing

It took Eimear McBride almost a decade to find a publisher for her first novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. Now, a year after she won the Baileys prize for fiction, the Irish novelist has been signed up by Faber for her second, a work which the publisher predicted would be “one of the most anticipated second novels of recent years”.

The Lesser Bohemians will be published next autumn. Set in the bedsits and squats of mid-1990s north London, it will tell the story of an 18-year-old girl who has come to London from Ireland to study drama, and who embarks on a “tumultuous” relationship with an older actor. Faber said it was a “story about love and innocence, joy and discovery – the grip of the past and the struggle to be new again”.

McBride said her second novel had taken her eight years to write. “After a long eight years of work – much of it spent wondering whether it would find a publisher at all – I’m incredibly pleased, and relieved, that The Lesser Bohemians has found a home at Faber,” said the novelist. “Their tremendous support during the avalanche of reaction to A Girl is a Half-formed Thing made them the natural choice for my next book also and I can’t wait to finally see it in the flesh.”

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McBride’s previous novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, was completed by the writer when she was 27, in just six months. After a series of rejections from publishers and literary agents, she set it aside, and it was not published until nine years later, when tiny independent publisher Galley Beggar Press picked it up. It went on to win her prizes including the Baileys women’s prize for fiction, the Goldsmiths award, and the Desmond Elliott, with the paperback rights taken on by Faber.

Writing in the Guardian in 2013, Anne Enright praised McBride as that “old fashioned thing, a genius, in that she writes truth-spilling, uncompromising and brilliant prose that can be, on occasion, quite hard to read”, citing the novel’s opening lines: “For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say.” McBride told Elle magazine last year that the style of her second novel was “not entirely divorced” from that of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. “It’s like an evolution of that style,” she said.



After McBride gave an early reading of an extract from The Lesser Bohemians this summer, Toby Lichtig described it as “ a ... compelling, linguistically dazzling, emotionally unruly literary bombshell” in the Times Literary Supplement, in which the novel’s heroine “unexpectedly runs into the thirty-eight-year-old man to whom she lost her virginity”.

“The syntax and wordplay will be immediately recognizable to readers of McBride’s debut. Posturing banter and self-doubt combine in a cocktail of emotional febrility (‘He is laughing and I almost am over my chasing brain’), before the pair head off in pursuit of crispy duck in Soho, the man striding ahead of her (‘I’m lagging his gait’),” wrote Lichtig. “Later, when she gets back to his place, guards, and clothes, are swiftly dropped, ‘modesty flying everywhere’.”

Hannah Griffiths, who acquired The Lesser Bohemians for Faber, said that McBride is “a writer who takes her place at the heart of the Faber fiction list and redefines the shape of the whole”. Her second novel, promised Griffiths, is “every bit as daring and imaginative” as her first, a work which the editor described as “phenomenal”, and which “started a whole new conversation around literature”.

“It’s a totally different mood to A Girl is a Half-formed Thing,” said Griffiths, admitting to trepidation over what route McBride would take for her second novel. “The first thing I thought was, what if it is conventional, what if it is a poem – what is going to happen next in Eimear’s writing? And then, reading it, I felt relief that she’d found a way of telling a story that’s her own again.”

She called The Lesser Bohemians “absolutely exhilarating to read”, with “that same feeling of being completely immersed” in a character’s stream of consciousness. “It’s a similar style, but the effect is very different,” said Griffiths.