The City Changes Its Face - by Eimear McBride

Book Synopsis

An intense story of passion, jealousy and family from the trailblazing, award-winning Eimear McBride.

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.

A MUST-READ NOVEL OF 2025 IN THE GUARDIAN, FINANCIAL TIMES, IRISH TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES, STYLIST, AND MANY OTHERS

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

"Eimear McBride does extraordinary things with language...she breaks every rule in the grammar book and gleefully gets away with it."- GUARDIAN

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

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

"Supple, unexpected, funny, libidinous ... A work of fierce intimacy, fearless in its descriptions of the inner lives of its characters, racked as they are by desire and hurt." Naomi Booth

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

"It's a rare feat to encounter a writer whose work feels both entirely original and timeless, but Eimear McBride is just that." AnOther

"[This is] McBride at the pinnacle of her craft ... McBride is at her most virtuosic in this novel when excavating forbidden emotional depths too dark to be confronted outside the pages of fiction. With its vividly realised characters, lurid plot and lyrically compacted prose, The City Changes Its Face is a typical McBride work. Praise doesn't come much higher." Financial Times