One of the most nuanced looks at grief I’ve read in recent memory. Grief is at the heart of the story, but the characters rarely express their sadness about losing their friend. Rather, they use humour to deflect, and drinking and drugs to forget entirely. The narration from all the women almost sidesteps the death of Lydia, treating it in an offhand manner. Thus, Thirst Trap is both lighthearted and funny, but morbid and heartbreaking in a way that really works.

The voices in this are so strong and distinct from one another. The house binding them together but barely holding itself in one piece is a wonderful metaphor. Some great coming of age anecdotes and good old millennial humour.

I thoroughly enjoyed this, and will be recommending to others!

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance copy of this book.

This is a good read, the characters are well drawn, relatable and easily distinguishable and I enjoyed this slice of life book.

I was engaged with all the women and I wanted things to go well for them. They are all goodhearted, lively, amusing women who are not living their best lives.

The book is vividly written and is very funny in places - i particularly liked the description of someone in a rush as being like a pensioner running late for mass - it's funny because it's true!

I also think that the book paints quite a realistic picture of the lives of many young woman today.. As an older woman I am sad however, that these young women's lives seem rather empty and meaningless. All the women seem to do is work in jobs they don't enjoy, have lots of casual sex and take lots of drugs. That is all very well, surely, when you are in your early twenties but these women are 30 and are throwing away their lives. Worst of all, they don't even seem to be enjoying themselves that much!

Having said that, I enjoyed sharing their experiences for the duration of the book and a lot of it took me back to my early 20s. I think this would be a good book for a book club as there could be a lot to discuss about the opportunities available to women and they choices they make,

Look I LOVED this, like a weird, huge amount. It's so messy and funny and devastating, a perfect summary of that awful time when your friends all get married and you're wondering what drugs you can mix with your drinks. I thought it would be much more earnest, because of the subject matter, but I genuinely laughed out loud reading this. One of the most convincing depictions of friendship I've read in a long time.

Thirst Trap
By Grainne O'Hare

Three friends sharing a house in Belfast, living from sesh to sesh, in low paid jobs and no serious romance on the horizon. Their fourth house mate died last year and her anniversary highlights how stuck in a rut they are.

Told in alternating narratives, this opens strongly with some witty dialogue and potentially interesting voices. With short chapters I thought I was going to fly through this one, but by the time each character was on their second chapter they began to grow less distinct and I found myself getting confused with who was supposed to be who.

As they fall in and out with each other, it's hard to root for their friendship, because their dynamic isn't demonstrated on the page, other than some wisecracking, the mentions of their previous shared lifestyle and their parallel efforts to procure drugs. It could have been comedic if it weren't so sad.

This might suit millennials more, especially if you can do a decent Belfast accent in your head. As someone who clung to aimless singledom a bit longer than necessary I thought this might resonate, but the cultural references mostly went over my head.

I really wanted to like this debut, and while the narrative arc and character behaviour weren't too my taste, I can see strong writing and interesting language technique. I will certainly read her next book.


Publication Date: 12th June 2025
Thanks to #Netgalley and #panmacmillan for providing an eGalley for review purposes.

Thirst Trap is a raw exploration of grief, friendship and adulthood. It was a candid look at the lives of the three women we follow.
The house they is falling apart and a great metaphor for the characters feelings. I absolutely loved the Belfast setting and was transported there. The writing is full of sharp wit and emotive making for a captivating experience. Tender moments are broken up with fun scenes, like taking a cactus to a club on a night out. I loved the depiction of grief in all its messy forms. If you want a book that’s deeply relatable then this is for you. An amazing debut and I will be reading more from this author. Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for this advanced reader copy. This is a voluntary review of my own thoughts.

Thirst Trap is a sharp, witty, and emotionally resonant exploration of friendship, grief, and the often messy transition into adulthood. Set in a crumbling house in South Belfast, the story follows three women—Maggie, Harley, and Róise as they navigate life a year after the sudden death of their friend Lydia. The novel delves into their attempts to hold onto the past while confronting the inevitable changes that come with turning thirty.

The writing is both humorous and poignant, capturing the complexities of female friendships in an authentic way that feels believable to the reader. The alternating perspectives of the three protagonists offer readers a deep dive into their individual experiences which I really enjoyed.

The novel’s strength lies in its ability to balance humor with emotional depth. The characters’ flaws and vulnerabilities are depicted with empathy, making them relatable and human. This book felt like reading about people I knew in my 20's, and I think it would be relatable to a lot of people out there. The narrative doesn’t shy away from difficult topics such as substance abuse, eating disorders, and the complexities of grief, yet it handles these themes with sensitivity and nuance.

Thirst Trap is a compelling read that offers a candid look at the trials and tribulations of friendship and personal growth. O’Hare’s debut marks her as a promising voice in contemporary fiction, and I can't wait to see what she writes next.

The fact that I’m far from the target audience for the debut novel from this Northern Irish born Newcastle resident was emphasised by me having to look up the meaning of the title which would probably be self-explanatory to a younger, female audience, and I’m still not entirely convinced I’ve got the definition sorted in my head.
We are in Belfast in 2019 and three friends, Roise, Maggie and Harley are celebrating Roise’s 30th birthday and trying to get a cactus plant into a nightclub that she’d been given earlier on that evening. All three are due to hit this milestone birthday with likely large amounts of alcohol and drugs. The three live together in a run-down but well-loved rented property clinging on to when there used to be four of them, but Lydia is no longer around.
These three are great characters, even if it took me a while to sort one from the other. Roise is still smarting from a break-up with Brendan, Maggie has a frustratingly spontaneous relationship with Cate and Harley, probably the most out of control of the three is fuelled by nights out, casual sex and drink and drug hangovers.
Grainne O’Hare has written about these young women and their lives candidly and with great warmth. Theirs is a friendship which has stood the test of time but what will happen when those around them are buying their own places, making impactful life choices and settling down? This is very often laugh-out-loud funny, the girls’ interactions with each other and characters they encounter are great. Full of good intentions, but regularly sideswiped by the prospect of a great night out, even though they are all aware that time could be running out on their lifestyle.
This is an extremely enjoyable novel, highly memorable characters facing events that you often want to read about whilst covering your eyes with your hands and peeping through the gaps. It is raw, touching, emotional and feels totally real. It’s blessed with a striking front cover and should end up selling a lot of copies.

Thirst Trap is published by Picador on 12th June 2025. Many thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for the advance review copy.

I adored this book. It felt like reading a season of Lena Dunham’s show Girls.

It’s about being a woman in your late twenties — growing into adulthood and navigating everyday life with friends, family, romantic relationships, and more. I loved how each character’s flaws and insecurities were woven into the story. Being an adult isn’t easy!

Thanks to NetGalley and Pan Macmillan for the ARC!

Thank you so much for access to this ebook in exchange for an honest review!! A few of my booksta friends who are actually from Belfast backed me up on this point- this book is so full of local anecdotes and quirks that it'll feel like a warm hug for anyone local. Our three main girls are flawed but painfully real, so that its easy to imagine ourselves in their shoes. The writing was so relaxed but still flowed beautifully- it kind of read like a diary?
Special mention to the cover too- it's going to look gorgeous on any shelf and I already know my local bookstore will have it in central display.

Thirst Trap by Gráinne O'Hare is an incredible emotional ride with three resilient Belfast women who have been through a lot but are not ready to settle down to a quiet life just yet.

Following the loss of their friend, Roise, Harley and Maggie remain together sharing the house they rent from Frankie who is well-connected and provides other "products" when requested.

The girls experience a range of highs and lows as they come to terms with the events of a year ago; each dealing with relationships and loss in their own chosen way.

The characters in Thirst Trap are wonderfully real, their predicaments are tragic and hilarious. I really enjoyed reading this down to earth not-quite "becoming-of-adulthood" story.

This is my most anticipated release of 2025. As soon as I saw the cover, I wanted this book. Then I read the premise and knew I needed this one.

Set in Belfast, we meet our three protagonists a year after Lydia has died. Harley, Maggie, and Róise still live in the same house share. The fourth bedroom door remains closed.

The days are filled with day jobs and hangovers. The evenings full of coke, cheap wine, and complicated sex.

Lydia is rarely spoken about. The girls weren't speaking when she died. Her death has left everything unresolved and messy.

This has me laughing out loud. The banter here is very witty and very funny. But also, it's so incredibly sad. I really loved the portrayal of female friendships in your late twenties, the clashing of loyalty and jealousy, along with the representation of grief, unspoken, hidden, until it's erupting

This is a really decent debut. The Irish are known for their storytelling, and this author doesn't disappoint.

Thirst Trap* was a brilliant exploration into friendships that carry us through our 20’s, what we do with feelings of jealousy, resentment and hurt as well as that that sometimes toxic closeness that causes us to think we know best for our friends’ choices.

absolutely tore through this, it was so much fun. outrageously funny but also very heartfelt! loved loved loved

Thought it was about time I got back to reading some of my neglected @netgalley titles so picked up this debut novel by Irish author @spacedolphin_ . No credits for the picture which is from @picadorbooks page as my proof copy doesn’t have a cover to show you. Anyway, the book focuses on four friends (three living, one deceased) who all share a house in Belfast. All three are pretty much single, in their thirties and still living life as twenty-somethings getting drunk, having zero responsibility and taking lots of drugs. The books focuses mainly on their relationships with each other and the circle of people they regularly mix with as well as their current f**k buddies. I liked the book but I didn’t love it and I think that’s principally due to the way I feel now as a 50-something. I think if I were still living my life this way I’d have had more connection to the characters but unfortunately I didn’t. Thanks to the publisher for the proof copy which is published next month.

“Sometimes friends hold you together.
Sometimes they’re why you’re falling apart.
Maggie, Harley and Róise are friends on the brink: of triumph, catastrophe, or maybe just finally growing up. Their crumbling Belfast houseshare has been witness to their roaring twenties, filled with questionable one-night stands and ruthless hangovers. But now fault-lines are beginning to show.
The three girls are still grieving the tragic death of their friend, Lydia, whose room remains untouched. Their last big fight hangs heavy over their heads, unspoken since the accident. And now they are all beginning to unravel.“

I had high hopes for this one and I was not disappointed in the slightest. Not only did it deal with some heavy topics, it did so with a warm wit - it was actually really funny! The characters were flawed and messy but with big hearts trying to navigate their way through their late 20s/early 30s whilst dealing with the sudden death of their close friend. I found that the writer got the tone just right and it made the story all the more real and raw. Overall it was incredible and I can't wait to read more from Gráinne.
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the chance to read this ARC.

Another triumphant debut from a Belfast writer - we are truly spoiled these days! Thirst Trap both broke my heart and had me laughing: two of the most essential ingredients for an absolute cracker of a read. Three friends living together all on the cusp of turning 30, an age where life choices and directions are questioned, even more so for this trio as they are dealing with a sudden and shocking bereavement. I loved Roise, Maggie and Harley's stories individually and together. O'Hare's writing is magnificent and had me engrossed in their lives from the start. A triumph.

I am not the target age for this novel but I loved its dry humour and glimpse into twenty something hopeless life.

Thirst Trap is a book that explores the experience of living in Belfast as a young person in the 21st century. In the tradition of other Post Troubles fiction, O’Hare’s prose finds its own version of the distinctly Irish tone of voice, straddling restlessness and fatigue to codify the uncertainty and instability that pushes the plot forward.

The story follows three female friends living in Belfast as they reach their thirties. They have been bonded together by the death of a fourth friend, and there is a struggle with guilt and a reckoning with social expectations that works beneath the surface and effects how each character moves through the world and interacts with others.

Our three protagonists share narrator duties between chapters, so while we get to know Harley, Roise and Maggie, we also get to share in how they see the world, hearing things they sometimes don’t even share with each other. The shifts in perspective echo the erratic and restless minds of O’Hare’s characters. Due to the strange case of grief that these characters experience, there is an liquid unreliability that O’Hare mimics through the use of tense in a Proustian (maybe more Faulknerian) way – narrative shifts between present and past in an unpaced and unannounced way that are almost too real for those of us who have experienced trauma. This is familiar; unpredictable rushes of memories that can be so intense they stop your body working.

Similarly, O’Hare shocks us with juxtaposition between humour and depression. Harley being historically bad at piano and taking lessons described with levity ultimately spirals into a trauma memory of the piano at their friend’s funeral the year prior as they carried the coffin. Maggie, Harley and Roise continually revisit moments with their deceased friend, showing their inability to escape, caught in a circular trap (clubbing, dating, returning to bad habits..) and unable to move on despite the fact that it has only been a year. These characters are stuck in a kind of limbo—between their university days and a fully fledged adulthood they imagined would happen automatically—but they feel something unseen hold them back, making them question whether it is each other. The reality is, being left alone with your own thoughts will inevitably lead you to a dark place if your experience is anything like that of these women.

We accompany these three as they discover that the preoccupations, anxieties and concerns of their twenties are not going to magically disappeared - dating, socialising and work all still dominate their lives despite how much they try to resist it. This is a book about the late stages of growing up and growing out of things, or refusing to. Saying goodbye in inexplicit ways and moving on. Realising that maybe you never figure out how to ‘grow up’, and that there are certainly enough people in the world to prove that this is not the end of the world; that in fact it may be just the beginning.

Growing up does not mean to "get away from your friends" just because they remind you of your past, who you used to be. Sometimes it might make it difficult; there are going to be people who hold us back, but O’Hare’s characters seem to have enough insight and trust in each another to be able to tell what’s what in the end and make the right decisions for themselves – perhaps a more true measure of adulthood than their previous misconceptions.

There are broad ubiquitous anxieties, common to lots of us in the modern world but here ventriloquised with enough character-level specificity to make us think "oh yeah me too," or "that’s so me.” Grainne O’Hare knows how to show us ourselves in the her characters; she gives us a place in the friend group analogous with our own experience.

The cast of supporting characters flesh out a realistic iteration of Belfast, with all its sights and sounds. Fergal, the over-the-top date who subjects Harley to countless icks; the landlord who sells them gear.  East Belfast, particularly the Hollywood Arches library, gets a surprising spotlight; O’Hare invokes C.S. Lewis when describing in this part of town, and we see a parallel: there is a desire to escape, a dissatisfaction with the everyday, in these characters that is enduringly common in the Irish experience.

It is comforting to witness a thirty year old cry over a messy part of their life, and have a father who will comfort them like they are still a child. It feels reassuring to know that it's not just me. “That’s so me.”

A note on how much I love the phraseology. It flows so naturally; among the countless stories from the North of Ireland that I have read, few have been able to accurately capture and emulate the voice, the lilt. Some of my favourites:
- to “have a notion” for someone
- “can barely run the length of myself”
- “no but you get the gist”

O’Hare can also be seen crafting simile after searing simile, each new and stylishly refreshing. I find this to be one of the book's greatest strengths, in tandem with her use of familiar colloquialism. The sensation of cocaine is described as someone pushing a cocktail umbrella up one nostril and feeling it open inside your head. The club is a "swaying wheat field of arms against a neon sky"; a house party is filled with background actors "churning craic." Churning! All of her prowess comes together to form a striking new voice, one which immediately fits flush in the new canon, somewhere between Michael Magee and Wendy Erskine. She is breaking from tradition and participating in the new one. She is, perhaps, helping to create it.

The draw of good Post Troubles fiction, for me, is that it rings true to the experience of individuals who feel alienated by the existing canon of writing from the North. It does not represent them, or the now in which they live; it represents the reality of their parents, the one that people from this generation never seem to shut up about. Books like this choose instead to reflect, very skilfilly, the shockwaves of what came before. This book points to the horizon at the other end of a plane of settled land like it sees recognisable fragments of itself in the oncoming future.

n.b. O’Hare is a bigger Swiftie than me, and in this book it shows.

An exciting blend of "Ghosts" by Dolly Alderton, "Blue Sisters" by Coco Mellors, and "The Rachel Incident" by Caroline O'Donogue, "Thirst Trap" was a fun yet moving story about growing up, romantic relationships, grief, but above all else, friendship. From the first chapter, you're introduced to each character's vulnerabilities and insecurities, and throughout the book, it just feels like you're getting to know a friend deeper and deeper. Despite having hectic and messy sequences, the story feels very real and I think relatable to a lot of readers. I honestly wish we just got more of the characters, especially Lydia and exploring the death of a loved friend, but all in all, a great debut that I'm sure will resonate with many people.

Thirst Trap has easily squeezed its way into my top reads of 2025 . A beautiful read with relatable characters that really captured life in your late twenties. It made me laugh so hard which is something I rarely do but the humour. and pop culture references were done so well. I got attached to all the girls but loved Róise story most.

I’ll be raving and recommending to everyone. My book club have chosen this for July and I cannot wait to discuss it!