Maggie is 30, pregnant, and broke. Faced with moving back to the town she fought to escape, she's wondering if having a baby with boyfriend Ed will be the last spontaneous act of her life. Ed is trying to run from his past with Maggie's best friend Phil, harbouring secret dreams of his own. Phil hates his office job and is living for the weekend, while falling for his housemate Keith. Rosaleen, Phil's mother, has just been diagnosed with cancer and is travelling to London to tell Phil, if she can ever get hold of him. As Saturday night approaches, all their lives are set to change forever.
McKenna’s language is intensely sensory. Prone to lists and poetic repetitions, he prioritises rhythm and flow over the avoidance of cliche ... Yet his intimate prose plunges you into his characters’ psyches as each confronts a turning point ... Even as it utters a howl of rage at broken, late-capitalist Britain, Evenings and Weekends is a love letter to the city – the chance it offers to forge your own identity, and the interconnectedness of urban life.
It’s to Oisín McKenna’s credit that, in his debut, he manages to deliver such a compelling narrative ... Maggie and Ed... perhaps betray the novelist’s rawness in that they’re less well drawn ... One can imagine the author reading these sentences aloud, driven by their rhythm and repetition. They’re hypnotic and beautifully cadenced ... An impressive debut, pulsating with energy, humour and an agreeable amount of erotic charge.
Sparkling ... In another pair of hands, the compressed timeline and the size of the cast could have made for a disjointed reading experience, but McKenna toggles among the different characters and storylines with aplomb. What emerges is an empathetic portrait of millennials trying to build lives for themselves amid social, political, and ecological change.
