Ordinary Human Failings

Megan Nolan

Average Rating 7/10 (1 Review)

It's 1990 in London and Tom Hargreaves has it all: a burgeoning career as a reporter, fierce ambition and a brisk disregard for the "peasants" - ordinary people, his readers, easy tabloid fodder. His star looks set to rise when he stumbles across a scoop: a dead child on a London estate, grieving parents loved across the neighbourhood, and the finger of suspicion pointing at one reclusive family of Irish immigrants and "bad apples": the Greens.

At their heart sits Carmel: beautiful, other-worldly, and once destined for a future beyond her circumstances until life – and love – got in her way. Now, as the scandal unfolds and the tabloids hunt their monster, she must confront the secrets and silences that have trapped her family for so many generations.

A Daily Telegraph, Times, New Statesman and Sunday Times book of the year.

'Nolan’s novel is dark in subject, yet retains a tender faith in a person’s, or a family’s, capacity for change.'

'A subtle, accomplished and lyrical study of familial and intergenerational despair, a quiet book about quiet lives... An excellent novel: politically astute, furious and compassionate... A genuine achievement.'

Review by Ben Macnair (101225) Rating (7/10)

Review by Ben Macnair
Book Source: Not Known
Rating 7/10
Set in the 1990’s. Ordinary Human Failings is a book of many strands. It is a crime thriller, a character study, and a historical setting, but it looks at the lives and times of the Green Family, who moved from Ireland to London when fifteen-year-old daughter Carmel became pregnant.

On the estate, there has been a murder. A three-year-old child has gone missing, and when following an all-night search her body is found, the Greens are the first suspects. On the scene is up-and-coming reporter Tom Hargreaves. He works hard at his job and is ruthless to get ahead, so he is first on the scene when the child is found, the first with the headlines, and the scoop.

Although it was only set 34 years ago, a lot of the things we take for granted aren’t there. There is no internet, no Google, no digital cameras, so the work is hard and long and laborious, bringing the tragedy to life, showing how overlooked a child’s death can be in a poor housing estate.

Carmel’s brother Richie is only 21 but is already an alcoholic who despairs of his lack of choices, the sense of desperation of all of the people who live on the council housing estate, their lives under the microscope of the police and the tabloid press.

The book is bleak and unremitting, building towards a wholly satisfying but shattering denouement, and we find out who murdered the child and why.

Although the book is a little over 200 pages long, it packs a lot in. The characters are all believable, and it shows how traumas in one generation have a habit of affecting the generations that follow. The setting is well drawn, with the estate and Tom’s desperation to get to the bottom of the story, to make his reputation, and to shed some light on the lives of quiet desperation that many at the time lived through.
Ben Macnair (10th December 2025)