The City Changes Its Face - by Eimear McBride (Hardcover)

About the Book

"A rainy Camden night, December 1996. 20-year-old Eily and 40-year-old Stephen retrace the course of their two-year love affair in search of what's gone wrong. Is it Stephen's reconnection with his long-lost teenage daughter, Grace? Or that he's a well-known actor while Eily's still at drama school? Maybe the autobiographical film he's just made has brought his old demons back to the surface? Or perhaps Eily's youth has led her into a mistake she doesn't know how to fix? Intimate, experiential, and immersive, this is the story of what happens when it's love beyond question, but trouble comes along anyway."--Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

A New York Public Library Best Book of 2025

A most anticipated novel of 2025 in the Guardian, Financial Times, Irish Times, New Statesman, Independent, Sunday Times, and Stylist

"One of the finest writers at work today."--ANNE ENRIGHT

"Her prose is as haunting and moving as music."--ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN

"McBride is a cartographer of the secret self, guiding us towards hidden treasure."--CLAIRE KILROY

"So, all would be grand then, as far as the eye could see. Which it was, for a while. Up until the city, remembering its knives and forks, invited itself in to dine."

It's 1995. Outside their grimy window, the city rushes by. But in the flat there is only Stephen and Eily. Their bodies, the tangled sheets. Unpacked boxes stacked in the kitchen and the total obsession of new love.

Eighteen months later, the flat feels different. Love is merging with reality. Stephen's teenage daughter has re-appeared, while Eily has made a choice, the consequences of which she cannot outrun. Now they face a reckoning for all that's been left unspoken - emotions, secrets and ambitions. Tonight, if they are to find one another again, what must be said aloud?

Love rallies against life. Time tells truths. The city changes its face.

Review Quotes

Praise for The City Changes Its Face

"A portrait of a couple transitioning from a phase of uncomplicated romance to something darker and more profound."--Washington Post

"McBride shares a common lineage with James Joyce and Samuel Beckett--not only as Irish writers but also as unrepentant experimenters with no respect for the sanctity of traditional syntax. In her hands, language is not a tidy vessel for information so much as it is a malleable substance."--NPR

"Conclusively demonstrates why she is one of the most thrilling contemporary English-language writers."--Boston Globe

"The style...like an emotional seismograph registers every nuance of fondness and fear."--Wall Street Journal

"Readers will be swept along by this entrancing tale of love and its many challenges."--Publishers Weekly

"McBride's incomparable writing style [is] rhythmic, muscular, spare, and altogether undefinable."--Booklist

"Utterly riveting. I can't say enough about it. Highly recommend."--Jennifer Haigh

"Lovers in London, but make it daringly modernist and inventive and odd."--Lit Hub

Praise for Eimear McBride

"She belongs on the same continuum as Virginia Woolf in terms of how she experiments with form and how she develops consciousness."--The New York Times

"One of our major novelists . . . the life here radiates through the pages and illuminates ours."--Guardian

"Blazingly daring."--James Wood, The New Yorker

"Nothing else feels so fresh, so radically new. Strange Hotel challenges and expands my sense of what art can do."--Garth Greenwell

"A writer of remarkable power and originality."--Times Literary Supplement

"Eimear McBride is that old-fashioned thing, a genius."--Anne Enright, Guardian

"Her writing has such glorious cadence that it should be read aloud."--The Times

"McBride is a writer with the courage to reinvent the sentence as she pleases, and the virtuosity required to pull it off."--Literary Review

"A writer for whom language is an end not a means, a beginning not an end."--Jeanette Winterson

About the Author

Eimear McBride is the author of four novels: A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, The Lesser Bohemians, Strange Hotel and The City Changes Its Face. She held the inaugural Creative Fellowship at the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading and is the recipient of the Women's Prize for Fiction, Goldsmiths Prize, Kerry Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.