A brilliantly dark and funny novel that grips you from beginning to end. Charlie Regan’s life isn’t going as planned - her dad is dying, her best friend is moving on up in the world without her and she’s resorted to amateur porn to keep herself afloat. So she decides to investigate a chilling event that her dad was involved in as a boy back in Ireland, and the repercussions of which still reverberate with the people of Clipim decades later.
Even though the plot of this novel is very serious and quite dark, O’Donoghue’s writing is so full of warmth and wit that I still found myself laughing out loud a lot. However don’t let that mean you write this off as a comedy, as the mystery and intrigue is as gripping as any crime thriller I’ve read, it just has a lot more heart!

Scenes of a Graphic Nature, Caroline O’Donoghue. 4/5.

Charlie Regan’s life isn’t going forward so she has decided to go back. After years floundering around trying to break into the film industry her debut movie is accepted into an Irish film festival, based on her fathers childhood tragedy, a conversation at the viewing leads Charlie back to her fathers irish hometown, as he slowly succumbs to cancer back home, Charlie finds herself in the middle of a conspiracy 60 years old that she must finally uncover.

Carolines debut “Promising Young Women” was one of my favourite books last year. Her writing is smart, funny and gives voice to a generation who find themselves quite often, adrift amongst expectation. Scenes of a Graphic Nature does the same but with a much different story, weaving in a moving search for identity and belonging. As a English girl with Irish family this one struck a chord.

Charlie is a raw character, her pain is cracked open across the pages and this, I find, is a real strength of Carolines. Her ability to flesh out female characters with such vast emotional depth.

This has an intriguing mystery at the heart of the story as well, as Charlie chases down the truth about the fathers past.

Clever, funny, tender and brilliant. Caroline O’Donoghue is one to watch.

Thanks to #NetGalley and #LittleBrownBookGroup for my copy of this book.

A fascinating mix of coming of age and mystery novel, this book had me gripped from start to finish. The London born daughter of an Irish father is extremely well drawn, but what particularly impressed me was the non cliched depiction of an Irish off shore island, written with minimum Blarney and plenty of respect. A great, satisfying read.

I loved this book, it was emotional and gripping. I really liked the exploration of being half Irish (I'm half Irish) and the way family history impacts our sense of personal identity. I also liked the portrayal of the central friendship - it could have gone the way of Talented-Mr-Ripley-esque melodrama, but this exploration of mild toxicity and interdependency, and the way friendships evolve and develop over time was much more true to life - especially the fact that they get through this rough patch and are able to sustain a different kind of friendship in the future.

I did really enjoy this book, and found it a quick, easy read which was very engaging from start to finish. I enjoyed the "history mystery" element combined with the present day drama: the ideal mix.

In places I did find it a little under developed: Charlie undergoes a lot of realisations and revelations triggered by nothing more than a memory coming back at the right time, and I do feel like parts of the ending were rushed, for example I still don't really understand the motivations behind both the crime and the subsequent cover up. It would have been a stronger book with more weight and exploration on those elements.

Having said that I did enjoy it and would recommend.

i loved promising young women by caroline o'donoghue when it came out a couple of years ago so i was very impatient to read this one, esp as it's set in ireland and books in ireland always seem to hit me harder

it follows charlie, an aspiring filmmaker who is having a bad year -- she's living at home, her dad is dying, and she's selling photos of herself on the internet for money. but the film she made with her best friend laura about a tragedy on an irish island where her dad was the only survivor has been picked up by a couple of festivals, inc cork, and maybe things are looking up. so charlie and laura travel to ireland where charlie visits her dad's home for the first time, where she meets people who knew him, who can help her visualise all the stories she's heard

there's a mystery element to it that i wasn't expecting, as charlie is given clues that the tragedy wasn't what everything thinks, and there are some genuinely dark, bleak, horror-esque moments

i think it was all a bit too over the place for me, with the mystery and the various islanders who kept popping up and disappearing again. i found it hard to empathise with charlie, and her awful life, as much as i really tried to.

but i loved the examination of her relationship with laura, i loved all the scenery descriptions of ireland, i loved that this was a fictional island and a fictional tragedy but raises awareness about very real issues and tragedies that have happened

and i loved the writing. i was reminded of how much i enjoyed promising young women, and i would love to read that one again

Charlie's career never really took off after college, having taken time out to spend time with her dad following multiple cancer diagnoses. Meanwhile, Laura, Charlie's charismatic friend from college, seems to have left her behind for a new boyfriend and glittering new career. When Charlie gets the chance to head to Cork film festival for one last weekend with Laura, with the film they made based on events from her father's Kerry childhood on the island of Clipim she doesn't hesitate.

Charlie was a very real, likeable character and was a pleasure to read. There were many parts of the story that ran true to me, as a "blow in" to a large irish family myself. The story of the people of Clipim however left me a little flat at times. I was confused by some characters behaviours (what was the deal with Benjamin Barry!?!). Although clearly a community that wasnt ready to let go of all it's secrets - it seemed muddled and confusing that even island newcomers were involved in fending off any interest in the past.

An enjoyable read still.

I think this is one of those stories that is going to leave a piece of itself with me. Beautifully human from beginning to end, this is a real character-driven book that has plenty of plot to keep a reader hooked.

The struggles of the main character, Charlie, hit home in fairly raw ways with me. At the end of her 20s, Charlie compares her dreams versus her achievements, deals with jealousy when comparing a close friend's achievements to her own, and navigates unspoken rules within complicated family relationships.

After creating a film with her best friend Laura, depicting a tragedy that her father lived through on the small (fictional) Irish island of Clipim, Charlie gives in to her lingering doubts about the story that her father told her. Alongside a deep desire to visit her ancestral home, the women venture to the island to try to determine the truth.

In a classic tight-knit community fashion, outsiders coming in and digging up the history doesn't go down well. Secrecy among small communities and the resulting paranoia is one of my favourites tropes in mystery novels, and it's used incredibly well here. Each character in the book is fully fleshed out leading to every situation feeling believable as a reader.

There is a theme throughout of what it means to belong to a place, and to a culture. Growing up in England but hearing endless wistful stories of Ireland from her father, Charlie deals with the expectation versus reality result, and has to face the fact that having family history in a place doesn't necessarily mean that you will be seen as belonging by the people who have lived there all along, and view you as an outsider.

Although fictional, the tragic story that is the basis of this book is based on a system that was in place in Ireland until relatively recently, and one that I was largely unaware of.

I started reading Scenes of a Graphic Nature by Caroline O’Donoghue by accident. It was not next on my ‘To be read’ pile but I was checking that it had downloaded properly on my Kindle, read the first page and before I knew it, I was a few chapters in. It is the story of Charlie Reagan who has written and directed a film about a tragedy on Clipim, an island off the coast of Ireland. The film is inspired by real life events told to her by her dad who was the only survivor of the tragedy and is currently very ill with cancer. When the film is selected to be shown at an Irish film festival, she travels with her best friend Laura to attend it and she begins to discover that her film is not an accurate portrayal of events.

This is a very compelling, easy read and I finished it in a day. The author perfectly captures the turmoil of being in your 20s and the completely relatable dilemmas that arise e.g. the difficulty but desire of maintaining friendships from uni, the reality of career progression, money worries and not meeting the expectations you had for yourself.

The plot is driven forward by the mystery of what really happened at Clipim and the girls travel there to discover more. O’Donoghue sharply observes the contrast between the rose-tinted view of Ireland, the actual warmth and beauty of the country and its people and the terrible atrocities that have happened in its past and continue to do so. Through the character of Charlie, she examines the expectations of Ireland versus the reality very well.

I found myself rooting for Charlie throughout the story and I, too, desperately wanted to find out what really happened at Clipim. My only criticism would be that in the last few chapters there is very little mention of her dad which seems odd when he is so integral to the story from the beginning. Overall, this is a really absorbing, enjoyable read that I would highly recommend. Thank you to Netgalley and Virago fiction for the advance copy in return for an honest review.

An enjoyable read and my first of O'Donoghue's writing. I found the book took a little longer than I'd like to have taken off but I ended up really enjoying this one. It was hilarious, observational and littered with little pop culture references.

Scenes of a Graphic Nature follows Charlie, a queer woman on the cusp of her thirties who feels like life is just not going her way, having to press pause every time her dad’s terminal illness takes a turn for the worst. Charlie is a flawed character, she makes bad decisions, she can be extremely selfish, and yet I like her. She is a struggling film maker, who feels second-rate to her friend, Laura, who is climbing the ladder in the industry that Charlie so desperately wants to break into.

Charlie’s life’s work has amounted to a short film written about her father’s unusual upbringing in Clipim, a fictional island on the west coast of Ireland, where he is the sole survivor of an accident that killed his teacher and school friends. When Charlie’s film is chosen to screen at Cork Film Festival, it sets in motion a homecoming to Ireland and an investigation into finding out the truth about her father’s past.

Once Charlie gets to Ireland, the novel is centred on Charlie’s struggle with national identity and belonging in a place that fiercely rejects her. Clipim feels like a very realistic setting, despite being fictitious. O’Donoghue paints Clipim as an idyllic tourist destination during the summer months, but out of season it feels desolate and shrouded in mystery, which sets the mood for the hunt for clue’s and the local’s hostility.

The most interesting part for me was the strained dynamic between Charlie and her friend Laura who accompanies her on the trip to Ireland. Laura embodies the type of girl who thinks she’s so irresistible that her lesbian friend can’t possibly not fancy her, yet their friendship is so nuanced that despite their fallings out their banter is funny and relatable. They can be brutally honest with each other and yet Charlie feels she can’t have an honest conversation about how her emotions have been toyed with. I thought the exploration of a friendship complicated by feelings between women of different sexualities was very sensitively done. Particularly when a kiss is brushed off by Laura as “experimentation”, it’s a very uncomfortable moment.

I enjoyed this book, but I was disappointed that once Charlie leaves London for Ireland, the story with Charlie’s dad’s illness is left somewhat unresolved and put on the back burner, which seems bizarre because he is the reason she is there in the first place. I would have liked to see it explored more as it could have made for a moving moment.

Scenes of A Graphic Nature, Caroline O’Donoghue’s second novel, is, above all else, a genuinely funny book. There aren’t many authors that I laugh aloud at but this had me giggling – real giggling! – a number of times. That said, Caroline possess a great skill for balancing the humour with darkness, in the tradition of the greats Maeve Binchy and Marian Keyes. Her first novel, Promising Young Women, did this, and Scenes… does it even better.
Charlie Regan is fed up. Her film career is going nowhere, eclipsed by her rising-star best friend. Her dad is dying in hospital and her mother seems to be locked away in a world of grief and fear. So when an opportunity to visit her ancestral home in Co Cork arises, Charlie jumps at the opportunity – only to find out that Ireland doesn’t quite offer the ‘Cead Míle Fáilte’ she imagines.
Scenes is a novel about nationalism, colonialism, second generation trauma and trying to survive in late-stage capitalism. Charlie, trying to follow her dreams, works three jobs, none of which feel particualry fulfilling for her. She is an English woman who calls herself Irish; but she makes numerous blunders when she arrives on Irish soil that highlight just how different her expectations are to the reality of Ireland. The novel isn’t preachy on these topics, but does force the reader to think about how we do the same – we view ‘the old country’ as twee, cute and somewhat backward, when these places are often anything but.
This is a razor-sharp and gripping novel about family, love, duty and friendship. That sounds lik a lot, but it’s filled with acerbic observations and that bone-deep humour I’ve already mentioned. The interactions and relationships shine, forming the heart of this novel and keeping things on track if the plot threatens to go awry. Overall, it’s a really special novel full of heard and humour, tempered by the long-held tradition of classic Irish darkness.
Out in July, I really enjoyed Scnes of A Graphic Nature – thanks to @netgalley for the advance copy!

Charlie and Laura are long-term friends who are at a turning point. They have collaborated on a film about Charlie's father's home island. Laura is more successful and confident. She is taking a job on a tv series in America while Charlie is having an identity crisis. They take their film to a festival in Ireland and spontaneously decide to visit Clipim where Charlie's father grew up. There was an unspeakable tragedy there where all the children in the school died except for her father.
The island itself is an odd place. It is set up for tourists and it hides a lot of secrets and resentments. It is the kind of place where one family owns half the land and everyone quietly seethes. At first Charlie and Laura are warmly welcomed. When they start investigating the past things become actively threatening and dangerous in a way I didn't expect. All of a sudden Clipim seems claustrophobic and scary. Charlie and Laura's friendship is put under a lot of pressure and secrets are dragged into the open.
It's a great stew of a book.

In Scenes of a Graphic Nature, by Caroline O’Donoghue, 29-year-old Charlie Regan is in a rut. She’s had virtually no success since graduating, sells nudes to make the rent, and her dad, Colm, is gravely ill. The one thing she has done is make a film with her high-achieving university friend Laura, based on Colm’s childhood memories of growing up on Clipim, an island off the coast of Kerry. He was the only child on the island to survive carbon monoxide poisoning at the schoolhouse, caused by a dodgy oil burner and poor ventilation, because his mother happened to call him home early on the day that it happened.

The film, It Takes a Village, takes Charlie and Laura from home in London to a film festival in Cork. From there, they make an unplanned trip to Clipim itself, where their already-strained friendship reaches breaking point and Charlie makes new friends and enemies as she increasingly challenges Colm’s version of events on the island that day in 1963. Was it really an accident? Why did he leave the island as a young adult and never return? The islanders become dangerously hostile towards Charlie as she rakes over a past they’d rather leave behind.

This is a bittersweet novel, blending the sad stories of the tragic deaths of 18 children and their teacher, and Colm’s recurring cancer in the present day, with dark and observational humour. Charlie’s droll comments about food shopping, the idiosyncrasies of the hospital ward, parental quirks, and much more, made me snort with laughter. When they’re not fighting, she and Laura make a great comedy double-act, bouncing off each other and recounting funny memories from their decade-long friendship.

I loved the mystery at the heart of this story. Charlie’s investigations keep the narrative ticking along nicely, and I found it quite haunting how she made important discoveries through old newspapers and hidden photographs. The mystery also gives her the opportunity to really think about why her dad told the story in the way he did, and what it means to her to be second-generation Irish with his version of events such a huge part of her life. Without giving too much away, the truth she uncovers is very connected to controversial, uncomfortable aspects of Irish history - there’s a reason the book is set there in particular.

While I read books about all sorts of different characters, it’s always a thrill to come across a main character I can identify with so much. Charlie went to university around the same time as me (as evidenced by the music in the clubs!), feels that her twenties are a write-off, and that she is falling further and further behind everyone else her own age. Charlie can’t help but compare herself to Laura, for whom everything appears to fall into place easily. She often has to remind herself that other people’s successes aren’t her failures, that Laura will have struggled and worked hard behind the scenes to get where she is, and that she doesn’t even want the same type of work as Laura.

I guess some readers from a different generation might be a bit less sympathetic towards Charlie, perhaps finding her whiny and lacking in proactivity, wanting her to give up her creative ambitions and get a stable, corporate job, and not understanding that it truly is that bad for Millennials (https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/05/27/millennial-recession-covid/). Then again, I sometimes get annoyed with older characters who feel trapped and bored by their secure, successful lives, so it’s swings and roundabouts really!

Scenes of a Graphic Nature is a highly readable, relatable, funny and poignant novel.

When Caroline O’Donoghue’s first novel came out a few years ago, I absolutely loved it. It was character driven with plot twists designed to shock. This novel is a little bit older and wiser in terms of its writing style, but O’Donoghue remains a fantastic character writer. The plot delves into a long-gone mystery, but that’s really not the most interesting thing about it… the characters themselves are.

Charlie, the protagonist, is in search of her “true self” on a small island off Kerry, and O’Donoghue’s shrewd observations of the experience of the English in Ireland are simultaneously amusing and unsettling. Charlie meets an American woman who reads her experience immediately:

“Charlie, I know what I’m going to say is going to sound condescending, and you can tell me to fuck off if you like, but here it is. Ireland is designed to make people feel like they’re at home. That’s the whole deal. That’s why thousands of people save up their whole lives to come here, even though it rains, like 350 days a year. It’s why every person you meet tells you their grandmother was from Wicklow.”

O Donoghue’s exploration of Irishness and what it means to be “authentically” Irish is what takes this novel outside of its genre. She is able to exaggerate the joy and the darkness felt by the characters who have “stayed” in Ireland and the lingering suffering of the islanders who have suffered great generational loss. This appears through their protective and often violent behaviour towards anyone who might “drag up” the past.

The condemnation of Ireland’s Direct Provision system tells us that this book is more about home than it is about nationhood. Ireland treats its asylum seekers appallingly and this is addressed through character discussion AND in the acknowledgements of the book. This is the kind of book everyone should read who has a romanticised view of our country. Other books that have investigated these elements of Irish history have been HEAVY. This one is not only light, but incredibly readable.

Caroline O’Donoghue’s second novel follows a young woman, Charlie, an aspiring filmmaker. Charlie heads back home from London to Essex to spend some time with her dad who is dying of cancer, having just finished making a film about his childhood on the island of Clipim where he was the sole survivor of a disaster at his primary school. Desperate to get to the bottom of what is seemingly a freak accident and to learn more about her roots, Charlie travels with her best friend and fellow filmmaker, Laura, to the island… where a more complex community exists under the shiny tourist veneer.

I found Charlie a relatable character and the story to be well paced. I think where the novel let me down was when it tried to do too much - there are quite a lot of different threads and subplots (which I won’t reveal as they’re a bit spoiler-y) which I found kind of befuddling, and the tone varied wildly. Regardless, Scenes of a Graphic Nature has some important points to make about identity and often nails how it feels to be adrift in your late 20s.

Charlie's life out of film school is floundering. Her beloved father's battle with cancer has taken a new turn, and she cares for him alongside her mother with whom she has a fraught relationship. Her career started and stalled with her one film of her father's childhood, as the lone survivor of a tragedy which claimed the lives of his classmates and teacher in a rural Irish schoolhouse. Her co-creator and best friend Laura has left her behind as she settles into cohabiting with her new boyfriend and her career in tv takes off, whilst Charlie supplements her take-home as a waitress with filming softcore porn in her bedroom. When Charlie and Laura find themselves on the small island her father grew up on, their friendship is tested while Charlie's dreams of being a director and the stories she's been told since childhood are thrown into question.

I thought this book was fabulous. I loved the mystery surrounding the schoolhouse tragedy and the shadiness of community around the truth of what happened. But more than a mystery, this is a story of belonging - what really shapes our sense of self and place in the world? And are the stories we tell ourselves and others the real truth of it, or simply a narrative we use to tether ourselves to a certain identity? Charlie's voice is really strong, but not at the expense of building the other characters in the story. Similar to Charlie, I grew up in England with non-English parents (though mine are Scottish), and that rootlessness was something I could strongly identify with. Feeling part of a place but not in it, being in a place but not feeling part of it. And the island of Clipim felt so real, that sense of being an outsider trying to permeate the tough membrane of locals protective of their community and history really drove the book forward. As things become unravelled and other pieces slid into place I was completely gripped, and yet nothing felt overly dramatic or unrealistic. I really loved this, one of my best books of 2020.

To me this is a story of identity and belonging, how Charlie clings so desperately to her Irish roots, roots that in reality aren't there, in order to have a link to her dad once he's gone, but also to find somewhere she can feel at home and herself when her friends are moving on without her and lacks a warm relationship with her mother. The need to belong is also clear on Clipim where there is almost a hive mentality to protect, at all costs, the island from the reputation of it's past.

Caroline O'Donoghue did a masterful job at creating Clipim, the tragedy she imagined was heart wrenching but not overly dramatic and the island itself felt tangible and the tapestry of locals and 'blow-in' authentic. As someone with an Irish parent who lives in England, Caroline perfectly captured the dissonance I can sometimes feel.

"It's a funny thing, the Irishness in our house. Growing up, it pervaded everything emotionally but it touched nothing physically"

I did find the beginning of the book a bit slow, I was keen to get to Clipim and discover the mystery I knew the book was about. I enjoyed those parts in the beginning exploring Charlie's relationship with her parents, it was particularly here we got to see O'Donoghue's hilarious and observational commentary I loved so much in her first book, but the sections focused on the relationship with Laura felt lacking to me, I almost would have rathered Charlie made the journey alone.

I will be posting my reviews on 5th of June at the accounts linked below

Really interesting and well thought out plot from the author - tracing history both of a country and through her own personal family story. Enjoyed the exploration of identity and self identity, as well as loneliness, disillusionment which were all explored really well. I found the sudden violence of some characters quite alarming and jarring, especially as it that didn’t feel resolved or tied up in the end. But overall another great book from Caroline, as I loved Promising Young Women too!

This is my first time reading Caroline O'Donoghue and I'm glad I did. I received an ARC in exchange for a fair review.

Scenes of a Graphic Nature is first off a very clever title - it refers to several elements of the narrative (which I shan't spoil) and caught my attention right off the bat!

Charlie Regan is an aspiring film maker and she's getting nowhere big, fast. Meanwhile, her best friend Laura is working her way up in the industry and her mum is bugging her to get a real job, and her dad is bed-ridden with cancer. To support herself, she's making lattes at the cafe across the road and dabbling in a spot of amateur porn on the side. Safe to say - she's fed up of feeling this way and at 29, something has to give.

When she finds out the film Laura and her made about her father's childhood has made it to a Irish film festival, they make the journey and on a whim decide to visit her father's remote island hometown of Clipim, which unravels a whole web of mystery.

I read this within a day and couldn't put it down. Would definitely read more by this author!