The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue

On friendship, sexual repression and abortion.

Puberty in the 2000s was Paris Hilton’s sex tape, Britney Spears’s crotch shots and Amy Winehouse drunk on Never Mind the Buzzcocks, and if any of that happened now we would have found a way to celebrate it, but then it was disgusting.

An international bestseller, The Rachel Incident (2023) is Caroline O’Donoghue’s second adult novel. It follows the coming of age of Rachel Murray and her best friend James as they navigate adulthood in the stifling landscape of 2010s Ireland. Abortion was still illegal, the impacts of the financial crash loomed, and gay sex had only recently been decriminalised under Irish law. O’Donoghue explores what it means to grow up amidst cultural and economic upheaval, crafting a narrative that will resonate widely with many.

Narrated by her present-day self in London, most of the novel takes place in Cork around 2010, where the titular Rachel works part-time at a local bookstore while completing the third year of an English Literature degree. There, she meets James Devlin — direct, bold, and definitely straight. A whirlwind friendship ensues, one that will change both of their lives. When James invites Rachel to become his roommate, the two create a bohemian existence filled with parties, self-discovery and illicit, sometimes confusing, love affairs. Threatening their harmonious living situation, however, are the lingering aftershocks of the financial crash and a secret that culminates in disaster.

The characters are morally ambiguous: flawed yet likeable. Beyond Rachel and James, we meet Fred Bryne, Rachel’s married English professor, and his glamorous, well-connected wife Deedie, who works in publishing. Rachel falls for Fred and, with James’s help, decides to seduce him by arranging a reading for his new book at their local bookstore. However, this does not go according to plan. Fred’s secret desires lead to a domino effect, entangling James, Rachel, and the couple in a web of dangerous lies and deception. Fred and Deedie are arguably the most complex characters, their relationship offering a layered portrait of marriage, identity, and class in Ireland.

Another standout character is James — an older man whom Rachel nicknames Carey because she can’t have two Jameses in her life. Carey is both unreliable and endearingly strange (he shoplifts singular grains of salt). Through both James and Carey, the novel explores the messiness of platonic and romantic love. Refreshingly, its most significant love story may not be romantic at all.

Rachel and James’s friendship underscores the novel. Their mutual desire to escape the bleakness of post-recession Cork drives many of their reckless decisions as they stumble through their twenties. The novel sharply captures the precarity of early adulthood: the instability, the yearning, the inevitable mistakes. It also pays tribute to the deep allyship found in friendships between women and gay men, a dynamic too often overlooked in contemporary fiction.

Upon starting this novel, I did not expect it to be so rich in social commentary. Beneath the character-driven plot and humour, The Rachel Incident offers poignant observations about what it means to come of age in a country where repression is a lived, structural reality. In an interview with NPR, O’Donoghue reflects:

And so there's all these like horrible, horrible tiara of Irish repression. For me, the crown jewel of that is the fact that if you were an Irish woman growing up of my generation or any generation beforehand, you could not think about your sex life without also thinking about the worst consequence of your sex life and how that divorces you from sensuality and from instinct and from trusting people and from fun.

Writing directly about the experience of emerging from a sexually conservative culture, O’Donoghue sensitively captures how repression shapes the coming-of-age experience. She explores the strange, often fraught relationship between the body, its desires, and its interactions with others, placing this in conversation with both the hypersexualised world of Western popular culture and Ireland’s enduring legacy of sexual conservatism.

Eventually, Rachel is forced to confront the “worst consequence of [her] sex life” — an unplanned pregnancy. Her decision to have an abortion is fraught with shame, uncertainty, and financial anxiety. Can she afford it? Will it derail her plans to leave Ireland? O’Donoghue doesn’t sensationalise this experience but presents it with clarity, allowing the novel to become a cultural document of Ireland just a decade ago — a reminder of how conservatism and repression left a lasting mark on Irish womanhood.

Yet despite its weighty themes, The Rachel Incident remains easily accessible. It’s sharp, witty, and compulsively readable — the kind of book you might pick up on a beach or bring to Hyde Park with a picnic. In other words, it strikes a perfect balance between humour, sexiness, and intrigue that makes the novel hard to put down.

If I have one critique of The Rachel Incident, it’s the ending. For a novel so rooted in realism, the ending is abrupt and arguably too idealistic. Loose ends are tied up almost immaculately, which clashes with the wider narrative of overarching chaos. Among the hopefulness, I was left somewhat unconvinced.

Still, The Rachel Incident is required reading for any confused English Literature student. I can’t promise that it won’t be bleak at times (the very nature of this novel is to expose the reader to the harsh, honest realities of contemporary life), but it will be unsettlingly relatable. Ultimately, The Rachel Incident is a portrait of platonic love and self-discovery, with many achingly tender moments among the frequent bursts of humour. Caroline O’Donoghue has cemented her place in contemporary Irish literature, alongside major names such as Sally Rooney and Naoise Dolan. I am excited to see what she does next.

Words and Image by Skye Munn, she/her