Oisín McKenna

“This is such a love story to cities & people & heartbreaks, death & loss. It's not at all corny, it's smart. But I just finished it & it made me cry.” — Eileen Myles "Signals the arrival of a novelist sure to resonate with young people who endeavor to make intimate connections." —The Washington Post For fans of Sally Rooney and Torrey Peters, a stunning debut that follows a vibrant multi-generational cast of characters through a London heatwave as their simmering tensions and secrets come to a head over a feverish, life-changing weekend. Summer in London stops for no one. Not the half-naked drunks and stoners, the bachelorette parties glugging from bejewelled bottles, the drag queens puffing on hurried cigarettes. It’s June 2019, and everyone has converged on the city’s parks, beer gardens, and street corners to revel in the collective joys of being alive. Everyone but Maggie. She’s 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, meanwhile, is trying to run from his past with Maggie’s best friend Phil and harboring secret dreams of his own. Phil hates his office job and is living for the weekend, while falling for his housemate, Keith. But there’s a problem: Keith has a boyfriend and there might not be room for three people in the relationship. Then there’s Rosaleen, Phil’s mother, who’s tired of feeling like a side character in her own life. She’s 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. Temperatures are soaring and the weekend is about to begin… Strikingly heartfelt, sexually charged, and disarmingly comic, Oisín McKenna’s debut is a mesmerizing dive into the soul of a city and a searing look at what it takes to build a life there.

A Novel

Evenings and Weekends

Lindsay

His body and mind are usually shy, they shut down on the precipice of deep and vivid feeling. When faced with something hot, unknown, frightening, desirable, his body and mind try to reject it, no matter how much it would improve his life and love and happiness to have it. All of which to say, Phil has a problematic relationship to bottoming. 

Whenever he looks at art or nature with friends, he feels obliged to express feelings on it, even when he has none. And this discrepancy between feelings spoken and feelings felt gives him the sensation of not existing at all.

When she tries to explain it to herself, the best she can come up with is that just once she wants to be at the center of things, no longer an afterthought. No longer a peripheral figure in her own life.

That was the thing with dom tops, they thought you wanted to be treated like dirt. In many ways, Phil did want to feel owned. He wanted to feel like an object, but a cherished one, a priceless heirloom. Something that you could do whatever you wanted to, but what you wanted to do was treat it with care. He wanted to be a hole to get fucked, yes, but also he wanted to be loved. He didn't want these two desires to be mutually exclusive.

Evenings and Weekends quotes

Join the club