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Acts of Desperation

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Acts of Desperation Paperback – September 27, 2022

by Megan Nolan (Author)

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"A love story like no other."—Karl Ove Knausgaard

"Hot as viscera." —The New Republic

A "blistering anti-romance" (Catherine Lacey) about love addiction and what it does to us.

Wouldn’t I do anything to reverse my loss, the absence of him?

In the first scene of this provocative gut-punch of a novel, our unnamed narrator meets a magnetic writer named Ciaran and falls, against her better judgment, completely in his power. After a brief, all-consuming romance he abruptly rejects her, sending her into a tailspin of jealous obsession and longing. If he ever comes back to her, she resolves to hang onto him and his love at all costs, even if it destroys her…

Part breathless confession, part lucid critique, Acts of Desperation renders a consciousness split between rebellion and submission, between escaping degradation and eroticizing it, between loving and being lovable. With unsettling, electric precision, Nolan dissects one of life’s most elusive mysteries: Why do we want what we want, and how do we want it?

Heralding the arrival of a stunning new literary talent, Acts of Desperation interrogates the nature of fantasy, desire, and power, challenging us to reckon honestly with our own insatiability.

Print length

288 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Back Bay Books
Publication date

September 27, 2022
Dimensions

8.25 x 2 x 5.5 inches
ISBN-10

031642983X
ISBN-13

978-0316429832
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Get to know this book

What's it about?
A woman falls in love with a magnetic writer, who rejects her, sending her into a tailspin of obsession and longing.
Popular highlight
Wheedling is cowardly, and violent. When you change someone’s no to yes by wheedling, you have stolen from them what does not belong to you.
316 Kindle readers highlighted this
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How lucky I have been that so much of my pain is from fearing the loss of what I already have, instead of suffering the absence entirely, as Ciaran did.
232 Kindle readers highlighted this

Editorial Reviews

Review

Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize
Glamour’s Best Books of March
Entertainment Weekly’s Must-Read Books of March
TIME Best Books of the Year
Bustle’s Most Anticipated Debuts
Goodreads Most Anticipated Debuts
LitHub’s Most Anticipated Books of the Year
The Millions’ Most Anticipated Books of the Year
The Observer’s Best Debut Novelists of 2021
Chicago Public Library Best Books of the Year―`

“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 KNAUSGAARD

“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, author of PEW and THE ANSWERS

"I devoured this book, my heart trilling with equal parts terror and exhilaration. It is an emotional thriller, a portrait of obsession—its pleasures and powerlessness, its inevitable corruption not only of integrity, but even selfhood. Nolan's prose is cool and liquid, her content perfectly scorching. I loved this taut and torturous ode to the parts of us that persist, even as we are wrecked by love."
―MELISSA FEBOS, author of ABANDON ME and WHIP SMART

“Nolan’s raw and uncannily insightful writing glimmers in a way that will shed new light onto wounds both healed and open — and possibly save some other nameless woman the suffering. She tells the truth about obsession and drains it of all allure.”
―NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

“Wrenching…a chronicle of a sinister, deeply imbalanced and unsettlingly familiar romantic relationship…Nolan’s writing gleams with dark precision. Her narrator’s piercing, almost perverse self-awareness makes the action both more sad and more urgent…The decision to hold in suspicion the very form she is enacting is what makes the book refreshing and complex. What Acts of Desperation illuminates best is the chasm, sadly still enormous, between feminist politics and personal predicaments of love, sex and romance. The novel is a powerful counterweight to the notion that young women today are free to define themselves apart from men…It is satisfying to see a young female narrator wrest control of the story of her debasement, to show both its specificity and its utter sameness, her victimhood and her complicity.”
―LOS ANGELES TIMES

“Nolan spins romantic obsession into literary gold…It’s no surprise that Megan Nolan’s ACTS OF DESPERATION is already being called the next Normal People…Nolan, a more bruising writer than Rooney, is also a braver one in many ways—or one with the courage, at least, to let her characters be ugly in a way that Normal rarely does….If Nolan as a novelist weren’t so deeply smart and self-aware, you might want to shake her wounded protagonist out of it. Instead there’s just the sharp kick of recognition—and sympathy.”
―ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY

“Nolan makes this novel of the thin line between romantic obsession and abuse so readable and relatable you’ll tear through it as if it’s a beach read.”
―GLAMOUR

“Megan Nolan’s absorbing debut novel traces…the messy motivations that twist infatuation into obsession — rendering a sharp psychological portrait of a narrator thoroughly transformed by desire.”
―NY MAGAZINE/VULTURE

“Frightening and feverish, compulsive and distressing, and as true-seeming a document of toxic and manipulative love as any published within memory…Acts of Desperation is, in other words, that squirmy argument between the sexes from Midsommar spread over 250 elegantly written pages—a psychosexual thriller about the ecstasy and embarrassment of being a woman who has sex with, and who falls in love with, men… Bodily and alive—hot as viscera, inward-looking, dark and soft…in other ways, its subject could not be more staggering in its scope, its savage, internecine central relationship serving as a bleak reminder of the ways in which the sexes have been socialized to be at odds, even in romance.”
―THE NEW REPUBLIC

"Please believe the hype...I was transfixed with admiration and visceral horror…Nolan’s headlong, fearless prose feels like salt wind on cracked lips. You wince and you thrill.”―THE SUNDAY TIMES

“Acts of Desperation is not simply a portrait of a relationship that descends briskly into the coercive and abusive; it is also an exploration of early adult life, of lostness and excess, of alienation and complicity… This is why Acts of Desperation is so resonant; its bad relationships, the over-drinking and the unsatisfactory jobs are symptoms of a deeper sense of distress, a feeling of being out of kilter with the world…Nolan’s subject matter chimes with a frank exploration of interiority and pain that is hardly uncommon in fiction, but it is strikingly singular.”―THE GUARDIAN

“This is a novel that does not shy away from the grim realities of sexual violence — and more specifically, the fact that male violence is endemic, and that the vast majority of rapists are known to their victims…Nolan deploys individual suffering as a weapon in the fight against collective injustice…While melodrama is normally considered to overwhelm the emotions at the expense of characterization, Nolan — freed from the constraints of stage and screen — does the opposite. Like Ibsen, she attends to the meanings and consequences of the smallest physical and bodily details.”
―JACOBIN

“Remarkable…This mesmerizes from the first page.”
―PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (Starred Review)

“Acts of Desperation charts the obsession of an unnamed narrator…with forensic focus and biting honesty.”
―THE OBSERVER, 10 Best Debut Novelists of 2021

“Ruthlessly peels back the ego to expose the soul’s most discomfiting corners… Acts of Desperation  submerges you in her interior life with Knausgaardian intensity…Her rejection of cliché and a savage honesty bordering on masochism recall writers such as Elena Ferrante and Jenny Diski…Nolan’s portrait of a relationship warped by obsession and low self-worth excavates our private hearts.”

―THE EVENING STANDARD

“Nolan, a young Irish writer known for her unsparing essays on subjects such as abortion, joins the likes of Sally Rooney and Raven Leilani with this tempestuous, Dublin-set debut about a hard-drinking millennial whose hunger for validation leads her into a torrid relationship with a jealous writer… Impossible not to devour, it's an unsettling book that leaves you chewing queasily on its knotty, gristly core, despite the narrative's redemptive framing as an act of purgative retrospection.”
―THE DAILY MAIL

“A bracing and poignant story of a young woman’s awakening; the writing is lucid and devastatingly accurate...With her narrator’s whipsmart tone, low self-esteem issues and penchant for sexual debasement, Nolan will likely be compared to contemporary writers such as Sally Rooney, Kristen Roupenian and Ottessa Moshfegh. While these comparisons certainly hold, in Acts of Desperation there is a sweeter sense of openness to the world, despite its many problems. The wry social commentary is there, but it’s from the perspective of a character who hasn’t yet withdrawn from the world she critiques.”
―THE IRISH TIMES

“Nolan’s electric debut probes the gray area between affection and obsession.”
―BUSTLE

“[Nolan] divulges the many complexities and contradictions of female desire.”―Debanjana Das, BUZZFEED

“A tour de force chronicling the many paradoxes of female desire… Nolan hasn’t assigned any names to her narrator as she is one of us: a self that eroticizes her own humiliation to survive patriarchy, and that every woman carries.”
―BOOKRIOT

"Nolan’s unwillingness to spare her protagonist or the reader is a gamble that pays off. It’s a rigorous study of a gross but key piece of the human condition, nestled in the set dressing of precise, excellent prose."―Sara Shahzad, Boston Globe

"Acts of Desperation is an unsparing novel about the troubling dimensions of our sexual desire."―Yen Pham, The Nation

About the Author

Megan Nolan was born in Waterford, Ireland and lives in London. Her essays, fiction and reviews published in the New York Times, the White Review, the New Statesman, the Sunday Times, the Village Voice, the Guardian, and in the literary anthology Winter Papers. Acts of Desperation is her first novel.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Back Bay Books; Reprint edition (September 27, 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 031642983X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0316429832
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.1 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.25 x 2 x 5.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #69,030 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,144 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
- #1,348 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books)
- #5,355 in Literary Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.0 3,079 ratings

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Megan Nolan

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Megan Nolan was born in 1990 in Waterford, Ireland and is currently based in London. Her essays and reviews have been published by The New York Times, The White Review, The Guardian and Frieze amongst others. Her debut novel Acts of Desperation was published by Jonathan Cape in 2021 and by Little, Brown in the U.S. and was the recipient of a Betty Trask Award, short-listed for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, and long-listed for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her second novel Ordinary Human Failings will be published in July 2023.

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Jo Liberty

kindle unlimited

Reviewed in the United States on May 30, 2024

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loved this book and the authors writing style!

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Anna Danielian

dark and disturbing but also gripping

Reviewed in the United States on May 10, 2024

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I read this book in two days almost unable to put down. The darkness that grips the heroine is at once terrifying, repulsive, but also familiar. The mixed feelings of self-love and loathing are dissected here with unflinching honesty as well as the inability of fully grasping the reasons for it. I am sure this book will stay with me for a long time.

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amanda berrey

this author is going to be one to watch

Reviewed in the United States on September 27, 2023

Verified Purchase

I just want to say the fact that this was her first novel is actually extremely impressive however I don’t want it to sound like that is the only reason I liked this book. Even if this was her tenth novel I would’ve rated it four stars. A great dive into the mind of our FMC protagonist who has an obsessive personality involving interpersonal relationships and a hate filled relationship with herself. She is in an emotionally abusive relationship with an attractive man who she has become obsessed with. She spends all her time apologizing for her “shortcomings“ and doing anything she can to make him happy. He takes advantage of this constantly and takes her for granted. After a slight comment by a coworker sends her off the edge of what was already a fast approaching cliff she begins a deep entanglement with alcohol and sex. This novel reminded me so much of Adéle by Leila Slimani (one of my favorite novels of all time). I had so much of a similar reaction to the violence of this novel. I had worried I had become desensitized because the last time I read Adéle I didn’t react with such emotions as I did before. This one went to prove however that I was not desensitized to the violence. I just new what to expect in my rereading. I will definitely want to know when Nolan writes another book because she truly has a talent

7 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

What did I just read

Reviewed in the United States on May 4, 2024

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This book made me sick, and cry, and slightly want die. But it was also beautiful and honest and tragic.

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LiteraryJustice

The Raw and the Beautiful

Reviewed in the United States on March 12, 2021

Verified Purchase

I was skeptical of this book because it was recommended by Karl Ove Knausgård, he of MY STRUGGLE, a 3,600-page navel-gazing, solipsistic, diaristic, please-give-me-the-Nobel-now total, cripplingly boring bore. Shocking to realize he has literary taste because Ms. Nolan's debut novel is part of the new trend in so-called autobiographical fiction, but with a difference: it feels real, it has the ring of verisimilitude, it arcs narratively, and, most important, it takes you inside a young woman's obsession with a real first love and then rakes you over the coals with all the vicissitudes of that relationship: from falling in love to breakup, to getting back together and moving in, discovering each other, loving each other, loathing each other. Yeah, it's a book about an abusive (mostly verbal and emotional) relationship, but Ms. Nolan brings it three-dimensionally to life. Unfair comparisons to Sally Rooney – why, because they're both young Irish women? – because the latter writes with a dispassionate cool, sometimes an abstracted gaze on her characters. Rooney's books are personal, but they're fiction. Nolan's ACTS OF DESPERATION is both personal and autobiographical, but never dragging out the minutiae like Karl Ove or thinking that a long boring conversation on an airplane is literature like another overrated writer in this genre, Rachel Cusk. There's something so raw and poetic and heartfelt as Nolan self-effacingly and self-deprecatingly, and self-flagellatingly and self-loathingly bares her soul, barely a diaphanous curtain between that tortured soul and we the reader. It may be one of the best books to ever get inside a woman's point of view of trying to make a heterosexual relationship work. What women are thinking. What women are going through. Yeah, it's lacking the sardonic humor of Rooney, but it also doesn't traffic in the ridiculous abuse excuse of NORMAL PEOPLE to psychoanalytically explain Marianne's being gravitationally pulled toward bdsm. And I like Rooney. Now I only hope Ms. Nolan moves beyond the autobiographical and effloresces into the promise of the great fiction writer who lives in chrysalis form in a stunning debut torn from her soul.

40 people found this helpful

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K

One day

Reviewed in the United States on April 5, 2024

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I read this book in one afternoon. I remember being this girl before. Thinking men would like me if.... This book spoke volumes to me. I felt her sadness.

2 people found this helpful

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BriBri

Male validation will never save you!! A lesson I’ve already learned, but returned to in this book

Reviewed in the United States on March 4, 2024

Verified Purchase

This was a painful read for me. The book itself is very simple, it can be read quickly, and the writing is very surface-level, not at all inspiring or groundbreaking. I didn’t highlight much as I’ve experienced and heard many of the insights and reflections before, as a 23 year old girl. But if you are 20 years old and under, this book might be much more influential for you.

Regarding the main character, I have seen desperation and insecurity within myself but the level to which the main character takes it is frightening and difficult to consume. It really started to feel like torture, just watching her screw up in so many ways, and her knowing exactly what was wrong with her and how it plagued her life. She did not make much of an effort to get better or find purpose in her life that didn’t revolve around her need to be seen and accepted by men.

This book is an encompassment of everything I do not want to be as a woman and maybe I saw a bit of myself and my past in her which made her even more insufferable to deal with. I really only felt drawn to the beginning of the book but then as I learned more about the main character, I really did not care to see how this all turned out because I know it would end up badly. That she’d either live a life devoted to men, alcoholism, and immediate gratifications or would finally come to the realization that it is okay to be alone, to be patient in love, and to seek value within yourself.

It wasn’t a terrible read, but a painful and disturbing one with obvious answers and conclusions that I didn’t really care to stick around for. I sped through the last quarter of this book as I just wanted it to be over. Thankfully, I was satisfied with its ending, as it brought back my faith for the main character. I won’t be picking this up again as I think I was more worried and anxious like an overprotective mother than I was an actual enjoyer of the book.

5 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Laura

Wow

Reviewed in Canada on March 14, 2024

Verified Purchase

Came in intact. Kind of a rough texture on the cover and back page, almost sand paper ish, which I wasn’t expecting. The story itself is worth the hype. Be aware it deals with some very heavy topics though and way not be for everyone

René

The agony of longing

Reviewed in Brazil on December 21, 2022

Verified Purchase

A modern literary gem that depicts the unmistakable mishaps of being utterly, completely devoted to the idea of loving someone. It narrates an obsession that is both remarkable and ordinary, in an extraordinary way. Luckily enough, it lacks the condescending, educational tone of some pretentiously engaged contemporary novels and thrives in its admirable (yet bittersweet) honesty. Memorable quotes and interesting subjects to discuss at therapy.

One person found this helpful

Muskan

Excellent but not an easy read

Reviewed in India on July 17, 2023

Verified Purchase

In nutshell Acts of desperation is a book about a women who fell in love with a guy few years older than her .During her this experience she struggles through depression, obsessive thoughts and other things. Love we want and love we get are two different experiences and megan Nolan described those experiences excellently. It shows that how vulnerable and desperate a person gets in a relationship or in love.

Writing style of Megan Nolan is really good. It's not actually a fast paced or plot driven book ,so it can be difficult to get through for some readers.

One person found this helpful

Lione

Loved this

Reviewed in Spain on June 5, 2023

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I read this books in half a day, the main character will annoy you however.

Anastasia

good literature

Reviewed in Germany on October 13, 2021

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poignant and honest

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