The Rachel Incident: A Novel

**A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR *•* A *USA TODAY* BESTSELLER *•* A brilliantly funny novel about friends, lovers, Ireland in chaos, and a young woman desperately trying to manage all three *•* “O'Donoghue deepens the familiar coming-of-age premise with riveting moral complications." — *People*
"If you’ve ever been unsure what to do with your degree in English; if you’ve ever wondered when the rug-buying part of your life will start...if you’ve ever loved the wrong person, or the right person at the wrong time…In short, if you’ve ever been young, you will love *The Rachel Incident* like I did.” —Gabrielle Zevin, *New York Times* best-selling author of *Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow* **
Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it’s love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them.
When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr. Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred’s glamorous, well-connected, bourgeois wife. Aching with unrequited love, shot through with delicious, sparkling humor, *The Rachel Incident* is a triumph.