Megan Nolan lives in London and was born in 1990 in Waterford, Ireland. Her essays, fiction and reviews have been published in The New York Times, The White Review, The Sunday Times, The Village Voice, The Guardian and in the literary anthology, Winter Papers. She writes a fortnightly column for the New Statesman.
Paradise Logic (2025) Sophie Kemp "I loved this wild, roaming marvel of a debut, acutely aware that I was reading a book completely unlike any other, admiring this voice which metabolizes perennial concerns about love, identity and gender into some of the weirdest and funniest prose imaginable. It's a privilege to spend time with Sophie Kemp's singular mind."
The Winner (2024) Teddy Wayne "The Winner is a lean, careening thrill of a book that kept me awake half the night and away from work the following day. Conor O'Toole's steady embroilment with the wealthy people he teaches tennis to is drawn with exquisite dread. Wayne has a genius for brief observations that reveal whole reams of truth about class, poverty and competition, while also never allowing the hideously compelling story to let up for a moment. Exhilarating, cutting, and funny, The Winner is already one of my favorite books of the year."
The Book of Ayn (2023) Lexi Freiman "I had the rare experience while reading The Book of Ayn of slowly realizing I had stumbled on something so good that it was changing my taste. So funny, so clever, so alive to the absurdity of contemporary life without reverting to the boring cynicism that would be so easy. I loved it."
I Could Live Here Forever (2023) Hanna Halperin "I was intensely moved by I Could Live Here Forever - I read it in one day and finished sobbing, feeling that I and the author and her beautifully rendered characters had all been through something profound together. Leah's relationship with Charlie is drawn with unsparing, unpretty candour which is constantly undercut by moments of dazzling tenderness - this book acts as a kind of vivid, devastating answer to the often heard question 'How could you stay with a person like that?' Halperin's desire and ability to so deeply consider the lives in her book became as affecting to me as the story itself, creating the sort of author-reader intimacy rarely found but always prized. I will remember and re-read this gorgeous, emotionally intelligent, truly beautiful book often."
Deep Down (2023) Imogen West-Knights "DEEP DOWN is a beautifully constructed and unnervingly assured debut which deeply moved and impressed me. Imogen West Knights reveals family silence and repression in a way which feels almost agonisingly true to life. There are no histrionics here, nor any glib resolutions, but a superbly observed exploration of intimacy and its failings. Not to be missed."
Cursed Bread (2023) Sophie Mackintosh "Cursed Bread floored me in its first page and didn't let up for the rest of its strange, hot, festering journey. It always feels like a true privilege to be allowed time with Sophie Mackintosh's brilliant mind and her third novel just confirms that she is only getting better and weirder and wilder. A knockout."
Common Decency (2022) Susannah Dickey "I loved Common Decency . . . a surprising, clever, sad and strange book . . . such a propulsive joy to read too."
Still Born (2022) Guadalupe Nettel "Still Born is an astonishingly elegant, intelligent, affecting novel, which has stayed in my mind from the moment I began it to long after I finished. I felt a huge sense of relief that I had encountered a work of art about ambivalence in mothering which encompassed a true authentic range of emotions and curiosities - vanity, aggression, jealousy and selfishness - with sanguine acceptance, as well as the beautiful and difficult project of giving and sustaining love which marks all our lives, mothers or otherwise."
Dead Souls (2021) Sam Riviere "I absolutely adored Dead Souls. Reading it felt like overhearing the most exhilarating, funny, mean conversation imaginable––which is to say it made me extremely happy and I dreaded it ending."
The Manningtree Witches (2021) A K Blakemore "I loved this riveting, appalling, addictive debut. In The Manningtree Witches, Blakemore captures the shame of poverty and social neglect unforgettably, and the alluring threat of women left alone together, in a novel which vividly immerses the reader in the world of those who history has tried to render mute."
