How would you react if your partner proposed an open relationship? This is the conundrum that Eoin, a young Irish man in London, faces. When we first meet him, he’s muddling through a cycling accident before meeting up with older boyfriend Rich and his college pals for a drink. Shanice reveals that the man she’s been seeing has had five other women on the go. This sets Rich thinking. Perhaps if “everyone was aware of the situation, then maybe they’d all be happy with it”. Eoin’s alarm bells start to ring. “One could have a relationship that was open, say, sexually, but was otherwise a loving monogamous unit,” Rich suggests before hitting Eoin with the suggestion that “maybe it’s something we could try”.
Moriarty’s breezy and undemanding novel centres around the aftermath of this declaration, with several flashbacks to how the couple met in Dublin before Eoin followed Rich back to England. He works as a barista in The Quarter Turn, a coffee shop owned by the absent Rebecca. Her interfering Uncle Al is still around though, as is cook Hugo who insists on showing Eoin pictures of naked women despite his obvious lack of interest, and regular customer Trevor who has him down as a football fan for some reason.
To keep things ticking over, Eoin hires in James, an aspiring actor and the book’s most likable character, who he eventually befriends. Following on from Rich’s announcement, and after downloading Grindr, he embarks on some no-strings-attached dating. He meets up with a Freddie Mercury lookalike from up north, and an enviably relaxed couple for a threesome, although they block him when he gifts them unwanted forget-me-nots of the pthirus genus. He gets to do some living but is it what he really wants?
This debut novel was one of the winners of the 2021 Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair, described by this newspaper as a “Dragon’s Den for writers”. Having a novel published is difficult in any genre but it’s especially tricky getting on to those potentially lucrative commercial fiction shelves – the kind of fare that used to be snootily denigrated as “chick lit” – so kudos are due to Moriarty for that at least. He has cited Nora Ephron as an influence and readers who have enjoyed her work should find themselves in safe territory here.
