He Is Mine and I Have No Other
Rebecca O'Connor
“I imagined he was the type of boy who wondered about things, as I did, who broke his heart wondering about things...”
Available as Paperback, eBook
A dark and intense debut about the overwhelming nature of first love from a brilliant new voice in Irish fiction
‘My heart broke a little bit for Lani and Leon. He Is Mine and I Have No Other vividly calls up the atmosphere of small-town life. Eerie, tender and wonderful’ Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure
Shortlisted for the Kate O’Brien Award
In 1990s small-town Ireland, fifteen-year-old Lani Devine falls in love with Leon Brady, whose mother is buried in the cemetery next to Lani’s house. Quiet and strange, Leon is haunted by a brutal family tragedy that has left scars much more than skin-deep. As Lani falls deeper and deeper in love with him, old wounds begin to reopen and start to change the shape of their lives forever.
“My heart broke a little bit for Lani and Leon by the end. He Is Mine and I Have No Other vividly calls up the atmosphere of small-town life, I could positively feel the damp mistiness of it on my skin. Eerie, tender and wonderful”
Sophie Mackintosh, Author Of The Water Cure
See more reviews
”Powerful and searing”
sunday Times
“I adored He is Mine and I Have No Other … Amazing, heartbreaking, brilliantly done”
Donal Ryan, Author Of The Spinning Heart And All We Shall Know
”A tender portrait of adolescence in all its rawness and sensitivity … This is both a love story and, in a sense, a ghost story. It is a small, self-contained thing, spare and unembellished in its prose style and … This extreme lightness of touch gives He Is Mine and I Have No Other a certain elegiac grace”
irish Times
”He Is Mine And I Have No Other is a book of secrets, and it burns with the sadness and starkness particular to lives forced into secrecy and silence. And yet there is, too, in this story a lucid and beautiful happiness, fragile though it may be; the happiness of being young, and in love, and of finding that love returned. Rebecca O’Connor captures vividly the small triumphs and catastrophes of being a teenage girl in rural Ireland, but in the further darkness to which she reaches is a truth for all generations”
Belinda Mckeon, Author Of Solace And Tender
Rebecca O'Connor
Rebecca O’Connor’s first collection of poetry We’ll Sing Blackbird was shortlisted for the Shine/Strong Award. Her writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Spectator, Poetry Review and elsewhere. She was a writer in residence at the Wordsworth Trust, the Centre for British Romanticism and is a recipient of a Geoffrey Dearmer Prize. She is co-founder and publisher of The Moth magazine. She lives in County Cavan, Ireland. He Is Mine and I Have No Other is her first novel.
@RebeccaMoth | themothmagazine.com
Here’s Oriol Miró hand-foiling a single letter of his cover type for the remarkable debut novel He Is Mine and I Have No Other by Rebecca O’Connor, out now.