The City Changes Its Face

'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

'A writer of remarkable power and originality.'Times Literary Supplement

'Day. Another. London city and world. There before me as you were. I still see you as I saw you and long to be you, as I was you, all the way over again.'



1995. London. Outside the filthy window, the city rushes by. But up in the flat, there is only Eily and Stephen, nineteen and thirty-nine. The total obsession of new love.



Eighteen months later, a rainy Camden night. Eily and Stephen retrace the course of their two-year romance now their world is merging with the common place and ties from the past are intruding. Stephen has reconnected with his long-lost teenage daughter Grace. Eily thinks about the future and their flat feels different.



The city changes its face.



Intimate, experiential, and immersive, The City Changes Its Face explores a passionate love affair tested to its limits.



Eimear McBride grew up in the west of Ireland and trained at Drama Centre London. Her first novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing took nine years to find a publisher and subsequently received a number of awards, including the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, and the Goldsmiths Prize. Her second novel The Lesser Bohemians won the 2017 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. In 2017 she was awarded the inaugural Creative Fellowship of the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading.