Back home after abruptly leaving graduate school in London, Erin numbly teeters through the shock of losing her best friend to an accident she doesn't want to talk about—especially with her mother. But it's easy to slip into the rhythms of Belfast, the lazy city; she takes an au pair job and bookends her days with early morning runs along the Lagan and hazy afters at a bar her old friend tends. In quick succession, she meets an American man who is looking to get lost, and falls back in with the local boy who both comforts and confounds her. But it is her unlikely, secretive relationship with faith that offers a different kind of sanctuary. Wandering into empty churches, gazing with mascara-smudged eyes at the stained-glass windows, Erin finally, gingerly, confronts herself.
Incisive ... Written in wry, sometimes repetitive prose ... It is some measure of Connolly’s skill that we retain sympathy for her flawed, messy heroine.
Complex and authentic ... Good fiction needs ordinary detail to contrast the dynamic, but the balance here is a little off ... In its best moments, of which there are many, Lazy City transcends these issues by its clear-eyed chronicling of human impulses.
