The Rachel Incident

A novel

By: Caroline O'Donoghue

Narrated by: Tara Flynn

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.

Loved all the characters

This book entertained me from beginning to end. Loved the narrator. Treat yourself to this book.

Loved it!

This was a book club pick and I was initially not very interested after reading the blurb. However, once I started listening, I was entranced. And I loved the ending!

Interesting and well written, could never describe it as funny.

I recommend this book. It’s well written, with well developed characters and an excellent narrator. Reviewed as “ brilliantly funny”…. Can’t agree with that.

Perfect narration!!! 

Not a genre I would particularly choose yet I loved every minute of it. Great story, great pace. Tara Flynn’s narration was excellent. All the accents from Cork to Derry to London to American are so well done. 5⭐️

Love the narration

The lilt if all the different Irish accents was so well done! Perfect for the story!