Canongate falls for Connolly's 'hymn to love'

Canongate has snapped up Lazy City, a coming-of-age novel exploring the aftermath of death, by debut author Rachel Connolly.

Francis Bickmore, publisher-at-large, acquired UK and commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Tracy Bohan at The Wylie Agency. It will publish in August 2023.

"Erin is newly returned to Belfast, having abruptly left graduate studies in London after the death of her dearest friend Kate," the synopsis reads. "She returns to the city she grew up in and ends up confronting old demons. An au pair job provides a partial refuge—she willingly submits to the household’s pristine and orderly regime. Late nights at the bar where her old friend Declan works is a different form of sanctuary, and there she meets an American academic who is looking to get lost. Her unlikely, complicated relationship with religion is another sanctuary again.

"Lazy City asks the question: What does it mean to accept a different future to the one you had imagined for yourself? It is a book about the strange and meandering period that follows disaster; coming of age in a place where everyone is literally picking up the pieces, in a family full of unexplained silences and feuds, and part of a generation that isn’t going to get the future it was preparing for. Erin takes the reader on a guided tour of the aftermath. Jarringly funny, sometimes cranky, often hungover, she gradually becomes alert to the messy lives and loneliness of others, all around her."

Connolly was born in Belfast in 1993. She has written for the New York Times Magazine, New York Magazine, the Guardian, and her fiction has been published in the Stinging Fly. She has also featured as a guest to discuss her work on "This American Life".

“I am so thrilled to be working with Francis, who understands this book so well," she said. "And always grateful to my agent Tracy, for seeing what I was trying to do in my fiction from an early stage.”

Bickmore added: "Connolly already has a reputation as an uncannily perceptive critic of contemporary culture and manners, the same quality is apparent in Lazy City. She emerges as a perceptive and agile novelist, whose prose is suffused with mordant wit and acutely sensitive emotional intelligence. Her debut is just the hymn to love and faith that we need in these complicated times. We are extremely excited to launch this debut in August 2023.”