The City Changes Its Face is both a sequel to and a kind of retelling of McBride’s brilliant 2017 work The Lesser Bohemians. It joins that book’s protagonists, Eily and Stephen, just a few years after its events, with the setting roughly the same - we’re still in grimy mid-90s London, although the lovers’ new house is somewhat less poky and grim than their Camden dwelling in the first book. It hops around in time between the ‘present day’ setting of late 1996, and various periods in between the action of The Lesser Bohemians and that time. The broad concept is that the ‘now’ sections detail an argument between the two over the course of a day, with the hops back in time providing some context. In the middle of all of this is the book’s centrepiece, a description by Eily of a screening of a rough cut of Stephen’s autobiographical film, which expands on his traumatic backstory, this time artistically mediated and then interpreted by Eily, rather than in his first-person confessional voice as in the first book.

The Lesser Bohemians is told from the perspective of Eily, and 18-year-old Irish woman, newly registered at a London drama school. As she settles in to her new life in 1990s Camden Town, she attracts the attention of Stephen, an actor of some renown in his late thirties. They begin an intense, passionate and often destructively turbulent relationship. Initially, it seems like the focus may be on the imbalance of power in their age difference, and their are certainly aspects of that, but ultimately the story develops in much more complex ways as each reveals details of their traumatic past, which in sharing binds them ever closer together.

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing is a stream-of-consciousness novel, told from the perspective of an unnamed Irish girl in highly distinctive, fractured prose.  It’s largely addressed to her brother, also unnamed and referred to as ‘you’ throughout. His life is limited by the impact of brain damage from the removal of a childhood trauma, but the love between the two siblings is evident throughout, in a novel that doesn’t offer much else in the way of solace.