Terry Prone: The rare delight when an author's second offering beats the debut

Megan Nolan’s sentences unfurl like flags at half-mast. They whisper open like tissue paper around a forgotten gift

Megan Nolan was heralded for her debut novel two years ago and has now topped it with her new book. Picture: Sophie Davidson

The headlines, when a new writer hits the jackpot, tend to stress that they have won themselves a “two-book deal”. The inference it is hoped will be drawn is that the publishers have such faith in the writer, that they’re not just buying one novel from them, but two.

In actual fact, of course, what the publishers are doing is taking a punt that if the first offering works, the second will be seen by readers as brand continuation. Sometimes it happens — Lee Child, Marian Keyes, Stephen King, and Cathy Kelly are all names that — writ large on the cover of a book — guarantee the browser standing at the table in the bookstore that if they go for one of those writers’ latest offerings, they will, at the very least, be protected from boredom.

It can only go so far, that author branding, and Lee Child is an example of precisely how far.

Readers who discovered and fell in love with his early thrillers may have demonstrated their fidelity to him when he got fed up with the writing business and had his brother take over the franchise, although the Lee Child name still hovers above the title.

His violently charismatic itinerant central character Jack Reacher has run out of steam, though, with the recent plots increasingly involving software or AI, which are about as interesting to read as horoscopes in a year-old dentist waiting room magazine.

It may take time, and people will continue to discover and love the old novels, but Reacher is done. The great thing is that the book which launched him wasn’t directly followed by a dud. His creator, over several decades, has reliably produced dozens of novels in the series, generating those ridiculous statistics claiming that a Reacher thriller is sold somewhere in the world every thirty seconds.

Lee Child was never afflicted with the dread second novel syndrome, whereby a debut novelist experiences national or international critical acclaim and/or mega sales, only to face-plant, in publication terms, immediately afterwards.

Some, like Charlotte Brontë and Edgar Allan Poe, simply died after their initial outing into fiction, although Poe’s specialism had always been the short story or novella, rather than the full-length novel.

Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone with the Wind at the end of the 1920s and saw it published in 1935. In 1949, she was killed on her way to the theatre in Atlanta by a speeding car, but long before her sudden extinction, it was pretty clear to everyone that a sequel — or any other novel — wasn’t going to be forthcoming from her.

The same was true of Harper Lee, whose lovely To Kill a Mockingbird sits alone on the shelves, popular and cherished to this day, despite the gruesome literary necrophilia of recent years.

Some once-off novelists, like Oscar Wilde, were just better at something else and had the cop-on to concentrate on that something else. The very weakest of Wilde’s plays knocks the hell out of The Picture of Dorian Gray, the central proposition of which is known to almost everybody who’s ever read a book or thought about ageing.

Most people have the wit not to read the actual novel, which is about the most tediously overwritten bit of melodrama ever crafted. If, enthralled by the central theme, you feel a sense of duty to read the work itself, you would be well advised to tamp down your sense of literary responsibility and save yourself a great deal of intense verbiage leading inexorably to a conclusion with which you are already trope-familiar.

Some stellar first novelists, though, do try. They try hard but come up with a second book that doesn’t come near having the impact of their first. The follow-up story is so bad, in the eyes of the publisher, as to be unpublishable.

The awful truth may be that the writer had only one novel in them. That’s not good news for either side, because the person who divvied out the two-book deal suddenly has a question mark over their literary judgment, even though the first book did well.

In ghastly conversations with the author, the publisher quietly points to the small print in the two-book contract that testifies to the amount of discretion that rests with the publisher when it comes to bringing out the follow-up novel. The ghastly conversation ends with indications from the publisher that they will always be willing to look at new work from the writer, who sits, stunned, praying the first book stays in print.

After they part, the writer finds something else to do, sometimes teaching Creative Writing in academia, carrying the credibility of having produced a significant early work while sadly claiming, year after year, that they’re working on the next Great American/Irish/English novel.

The exception is the writer of a debut breath-taker whose second novel measures up to the first. The glorious exception — rare, sadly — is the writer who betters that first book.

This summer, it is Megan Nolan, whose first novel, Acts of Desperation, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2021. That debut offering was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. So far, so critically acclaimed.

Now the 30-plus Waterford woman has produced a second: Ordinary Human Failings. It is markedly better than its forerunner. In theory, it’s a thriller, an account of a child murder in England and how suspicion falls on another girl, that child belonging to one of those exceptional families where the neighbours DON’T say to journalists reporting the murder: “They were lovely people who kept themselves to themselves and that young mother LIVED for her daughter.”

This family are immigrants into England from Waterford, and the sudden peculiar way they arrived is just one of the many disadvantageous things about them.

The book is set in the 1990s, allowing a pivotal character — the print journalist madly seeking to get the family to “tell their side of the story” — to operate without either the constraints of today’s ethical standards or the pressures of social media.

Just as the reader comes to comfortable conclusions about the journalist, Nolan upends them. The same thing happens just as the reader decides that, however subtly layered and brilliantly observed is the alcohol problem of one character, fictional alcoholics can hold your attention for just so long. At precisely that point, another character articulates your thoughts.

Nolan hasn’t quite written a thriller. While it’s exciting, it head-butts an anti-climax towards the end. She hasn’t quite written a novel, either. The compelling pull on the reader is not of promised action or resolution but of stomach-clenching pain, of layered insight, of a sentence on each and every page that forces a wondering re-read. The sentences unfurl like flags at half-mast. They whisper open as does old tissue paper around a forgotten gift. They evoke Joan Didion but testify to a unique and Irish genius.