2022 Betty Trask Prize (nominee)
We're all looking to get what we want - but do we know what we need?
She's twenty-three and in love with love. He's older, and the most beautiful man she's ever seen. The affair is quickly consuming.
But this relationship is unpredictable, and behind his perfect looks is a mean streak. She's intent on winning him over, but neither is living up to the other's ideals. He keeps emailing his glamorous ex, and she's starting to give in to secret, shameful cravings of her own. The search for a fix is frantic, and taking a dangerous turn...
SHORTLISTED FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD
'Such brilliant writing about female desire...honest and visceral' Marian Keyes'
'Visceral, honest, unputdownable...You'll devour it in a day.' Stylist
'Raw, honest, brutal and real,' Lykke Li, Observer
Genre: Literary Fiction
She's twenty-three and in love with love. He's older, and the most beautiful man she's ever seen. The affair is quickly consuming.
But this relationship is unpredictable, and behind his perfect looks is a mean streak. She's intent on winning him over, but neither is living up to the other's ideals. He keeps emailing his glamorous ex, and she's starting to give in to secret, shameful cravings of her own. The search for a fix is frantic, and taking a dangerous turn...
SHORTLISTED FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD
'Such brilliant writing about female desire...honest and visceral' Marian Keyes'
'Visceral, honest, unputdownable...You'll devour it in a day.' Stylist
'Raw, honest, brutal and real,' Lykke Li, Observer
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"A darkly rich and heady exploration of hunger and unraveling, Acts of Desperation is unashamed and honest. It questions the truest way to inhabit a body and shows us the horror and the beauty in learning to be alone." - Jessica Andrews
"Megan Nolan is a huge literary talent, and her first novel, Acts of Desperation, is a love story like no other. The writing is intense and honest, with a rare access to real life, but it is also reflective and full of insights, and with this combination the novel manages to separate the idea of love and the experience of it, and take the reader to the place where it comes into being." - Karl Ove Knausgård
"Megan Nolan writes with piercing vulnerability and precision. Her debut novel, Acts of Desperation is a blistering anti-romance about the seductive destruction of trying to find self-worth in the gaze of another." - Catherine Lacey
"Megan Nolan is a huge literary talent, and her first novel, Acts of Desperation, is a love story like no other. The writing is intense and honest, with a rare access to real life, but it is also reflective and full of insights, and with this combination the novel manages to separate the idea of love and the experience of it, and take the reader to the place where it comes into being." - Karl Ove Knausgård
"Megan Nolan writes with piercing vulnerability and precision. Her debut novel, Acts of Desperation is a blistering anti-romance about the seductive destruction of trying to find self-worth in the gaze of another." - Catherine Lacey
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