Megan Nolan was born in 1990 in Waterford, Ireland. Her essays and reviews have been published by the
New York Times,
White Review,
Guardian, and
Frieze amongst others.
Her debut novel,
Acts of Desperation, was the recipient of a Betty Trask Award, shortlisted for the
Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize.
Nolan's new novel is
Ordinary Human Failings.
At CrimeReads she tagged five books that "combine the best of crime writing with the most reflective and thoughtful expositions of family dynamics." One title on the list:
Happy Like Murderers by Gordon Burn
This is in a sense a difficult book to recommend. Unquestionably one of the more incisive, brilliantly written and sensitive works of crime non-fiction I have ever come across, it is also so upsetting and appalling that it leaves you feeling 
you have learned some unfamiliar, crucial truths but in doing so have had your spirit degraded. Burn writes about the notorious British serial killing couple Fred and Rosemary West, who perpetuated rape, torture, kidnapping and murder upon members of their own family and strangers. Written to be as un-sensational as possible under the circumstances, nevertheless the sheer scale and depth of the couple’s depravity is chastening for the reader, not least because of what it suggests about a society which produced people capable of such deeds. The same society was then able to ignore their wickedness for decades, missing many opportunities to halt it. What marks Happy Like Murderers out for me as a work of true genius is that it upends the secrecy of the family unit and questions the wisdom of allowing ourselves to turn away from others with privacy as our excuse. It also looks at the world of brutal poverty and sexual abuse both Fred and Rose emerged from themselves, viciousness begetting viciousness. This is an almost haunted feeling work, but one which easily holds its own alongside The Executioner’s Song and In Cold Blood as a work of exceptional literary and journalistic merit.
Read about
the other entries on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
Megan Nolan was born in 1990 in Waterford, Ireland. Her essays and reviews have been published by the New York Times, White Review, Guardian, and Frieze amongst others.
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