Hey all, I'm Glenn Weldon, and this is NPR's Book of the Day.

Writer Caroline O'Donohue's new novel The Rachel Incident is told from the point of view of an Irish woman in her 30s, looking back at her younger self, at the glorious mess she was in her 20s, drinking too much and making bad choices.

Mostly, she remembers one friendship in particular that drew her into a tangled network of people

with complicated relationships that only grew more tangled the way relationships tend to do in

your 20s.

It's a book about approaching life's many crossroads, personal, political, romantic, sexual,

and choosing the roads we end up taking.

O'Donohue talked with Weekend Edition Saturdays, Miles Parks.

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Cork City, Ireland, 2009.

Rachel is a student working in a bookshop when a guy named James comes up to her and says,

Someone here has scabies. He said it like he was Poirot investigating a country house blighted by murder.

What? I said, the shock of the sentence, shattering the glassy reserve that I had cultivated as part of my persona.

The persona, broadly known as girl who works

in bookshop. And what are scabies? They're like a parasite, he said, like worms? No, worms are

inside. Skabies are outside. Have you ever had worms? And so begins their best friendship. Rachel and

James move into a crappy apartment where they drink cheap wine and watch

TV in bed and their lives slowly intertwine. The Rachel incident is a book about friendship,

romance, and coming of age at a specific time in history. The author, Caroline O'Donoghue, joins me now.

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