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We Were Young  By  cover art

We Were Young

By: Niamh Campbell
Narrated by: Patrick Moy
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Publisher's summary

'Young then. Before Alva and everything.'

Cormac is a photographer. Approaching 40 and still single, he suddenly finds himself 'the leftover man'.

Through talent and charm, he has escaped small-town life and a haunted family. But now his peers are all getting divorced, dying or buying trampolines in the suburbs. Cormac is dating former students, staying out all night and receiving boilerplate rejection emails for his work, propped up by a constellation of the women and ex-lovers in his life.

In the last weeks of the year, Cormac meets Caroline, an ambitious young dancer, and embarks on a miniature odyssey of intimacy. Simultaneously, he must take responsibility for his married brother, whose mid-life crisis forces them both to reckon with a death in the family that hangs over those left behind.

Set in Dublin, a city built on burial pits, We Were Young is a dazzlingly clever, deeply enjoyable novel from a Sunday Times Short Story Award-winning author.

©2022 Niamh Campbell (P)2022 Orion Publishing Group

Critic reviews

"I love this woman's writing. Golden sentences." (Diana Evans)

"In 30 years from now will some literary critic be asking what is meant by 'Campbellesque'? That would not surprise me in the slightest." (Irish Times)

"She has already been compared with writers such as Eimear McBride, Ali Smith and Claire Louise Bennett, and indeed Niamh Campbell does add a distinctive new voice to Irish literature.... Witty, fiery, wistful and even shocking, with engrossing heady prose, Campbell's style is unique." (Irish Independent)

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Astonishing

Smart, funny, charming, moving… I loved this book, even more than I loved Campbell’s previous novel. Every character is so beautifully drawn, almost entirely through dialogue - and the conversations between them felt original and surprising and also achingly real. All about a group of variously aged artists (I say this because the age differences create some of the funniest and most poignant exchanges), who can each be very pretentious and transparent, and yet I felt so much affection for them all. A perfect document of our times, in all its absurdity. I think Campbell is crazily talented. Wonderfully read by Patrick Moy as well.

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