Recommendations
Books Like Acts of Desperation
Best books to read after Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan
Megan Nolan's Acts of Desperation is the confessional Irish debut about a woman's obsessive, self-destructive relationship with a cold Danish man — a study in female abjection. These recommendations explore the tradition of contemporary Irish literary fiction by young women, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the novel about a woman who sees herself clearly and cannot stop what she is doing to herself.
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Buy on AmazonNormal People
by Sally Rooney
The essential Irish literary companion — Connell and Marianne in Sligo and Dublin; the most widely read contemporary Irish literary novel about young people's complicated intimacy, and the book most frequently paired with Acts of Desperation in reviews.
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Buy on AmazonConversations with Friends
by Sally Rooney
The companion Rooney — Frances and Bobbi entangled with a married couple; shares Acts of Desperation's interest in a young Irish woman's intelligence coexisting with her emotional self-destruction in a relationship she knows is bad for her.
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Buy on AmazonExciting Times
by Naoise Dolan
The companion debut Irish novel — Ava in Hong Kong navigating two simultaneous relationships; shares Acts of Desperation's cool prose and its interest in a young Irish woman who observes her own situation with more precision than she can act on.
- 4Buy on Amazon
Still Born
by Megan Nolan
Nolan's second novel — exploring the pressure to become a mother, following a different narrator; for readers who want to see where Nolan went after Acts of Desperation and the subject matter that preoccupies her across her work.
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Buy on AmazonMy Year of Rest and Relaxation
by Ottessa Moshfegh
The American companion in the tradition of the literary novel of female self-destruction — Moshfegh's narrator medicating herself into a year of sleep; shares Acts of Desperation's interest in a woman who cannot stop doing something that is clearly destroying her and who narrates the destruction with detached clarity.
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Buy on AmazonThe Piano Teacher
by Elfriede Jelinek
The Austrian Nobel Prize-winning predecessor in the tradition of the literary novel of female sexual abjection — Erika Kohut, a repressed Vienna Conservatory piano teacher, and the violence of her own sexuality; the most extreme and most formally radical novel in the tradition that Acts of Desperation works in.
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Buy on AmazonDept. of Speculation
by Jenny Offill
The companion American literary novel of a woman in a deteriorating relationship — Offill's fragmented account of a marriage and an affair; shares Acts of Desperation's interest in a woman who cannot reconcile her intelligence about her situation with her inability to change it.
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Buy on AmazonA Grief Observed
by C.S. Lewis
The companion confessional text in the tradition of the grief journal turned literary artifact — Lewis's notebooks in the weeks after his wife's death; shares Acts of Desperation's quality of a text written from inside a consuming emotional state and the way that interiority produces a formal intensity that conventional narration cannot replicate.
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