If Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by left you craving messy creative friendships laced with longing, then reach for The Rachel Incident by .
Buy on AmazonWhy It's Your Next Read
- Platonic love w/ unspoken romantic undertow
- Theater & lit ambition = creative codependency
- Millennial ennui meets Irish austerity-era angst
- Queer identity tangled in straight friendship
Zevin made you fall for that electric charge between collaborators who can't quite name what they need from each other. O'Donoghue delivers the same high-stakes intimacy through Rachel and James—two Irish lit majors whose friendship becomes a co-conspiracy of ambition, bad decisions, and unacknowledged desire. Set against Cork's austerity-era precarity, their bond is both lifeline and pressure point, theatre dreams colliding with economic reality and sexual fluidity that refuses easy labels.
This is millennial coming-of-age as postmortem: funny, ruinous, and bracingly self-aware. The nostalgia here isn't comfort—it's the ache of recognizing who you were when you couldn't afford to be anyone yet.
If you loved watching Sam and Sadie destroy and rebuild each other, Rachel and James will wreck you too.
What Readers Are Saying
"I loved how Caroline O'Donoghue captured the layered emotions of being in one's early 20's. The mess, the yearning, the intensity of not yet loving who you are but wanting to." — Thomas, Goodreads
"The Rachel Incident is a wonderful story about friendship, love, and everything that falls in between of growing up. It’s books like this that remind me what it was like to be in my twenties again." — Rachel Hanes, Goodreads
"It was catnip for me: so moving and so smart and, yes, often so funny..." — Chris, Goodreads
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