On a dark evening in ‘downpour Camden’, a young woman waits for her lover, an actor, to return from a show. She, Eily, is twenty; he, Stephen, is forty. The house they live in (which, she thinks, is only ours ‘ish’) is littered with the detritus of his adult life – ‘bills in his name’, ‘a photo of his daughter’. The imbalance is immediately apparent, and immediately challenging to a reader who might be primed to see abuses of power in the gulf – in age and experience – between them. 

Stephen is preoccupied with the imminent arrival of his daughter, Grace. This is what Eily sulkily calls ‘the insistence of fatherhood’. Eily herself has barely left the house for days, worrying and exasperating Stephen, and they haven’t been intimate for months. Their conversation deteriorates, and the night is peppered with memories of their first summer together, where ‘the fucking’s all good, all fucking day’. As the novel goes on, recollections move from summer to winter to autumn, memories and imagined memories bleeding into each other. What is causing the rupture between them? Is it Grace, Eily’s depression, the traumatic film Stephen is making, or something else?

Eimear McBride’s fourth novel, The City Changes Its Face, marks a sharp change of direction. In her previous novel, Strange Hotel, the unnamed narrator was slippery and distant, drifting through cities and hotel rooms like a ghost. Here, McBride grants the reader total access to Eily’s mind. Her narration is