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We’ve all got that friend. The one who plonks herself down at the pub table, overflowing with anecdotes about the night before. The one who has the whole group in thrall to her stories, each one a marmalade-dropper in its own right and delivered with panache and killer timing. Whether it’s sexual escapades or a slice of office gossip, she’s got the tea. It’s always a joy hanging out with this friend. A rush. And that’s what it feels like reading Thirst Trap, the debut novel from Gráinne O’Hare.

At the heart of Thirst Trap are three Belfast housemates – Maggie, Roise and Harley – who are coming to the end of their roaring twenties and faced with the fact that their fourth best friend, Lydia, will never turn 30. We join the women a year on from Lydia’s death, and they’re still in the same mouldy flat share, with Lydia’s pet turtle in the living room and her old moisturiser going crusty on the bathroom shelf. To cope – or to avoid coping – the trio are self-medicating with booze, drugs, questionable relationships and bad sex.

This is not a book for the fainthearted: O’Hare has a true gift for a visceral simile, her sandpapery prose scribbling vivid pictures of messy pleasure that you can practically smell off the tequila-soaked page. In these women’s world, taking MDMA is like having “glass shards dissolve” in the bridge of your nose. An unfilled condom lies by the side of a bed “like the abandoned hide of a shedding reptile”. One of the friends is sick in the loo at a club, and her false eyelashes, “loosened by vomiting”, morph into “strange black caterpillars” lurking in the toilet bowl.

O’Hare, I assume, must have done a lot of partying in her 32 years on the planet. “I actually didn’t really go out until I was about 22,” says the author. She is much gentler and more polite in conversation than her writing might suggest. “I definitely had the party years in Belfast, but I came to them quite late. I didn’t think I liked alcohol and I didn’t have an interest in going to pubs and clubs. I just thought I’d stay in and read my books – and write my terrible books as well.” She laughs, recalling how, as a teenager, she went through a phase of writing historical fiction that, in hindsight, was like “a tamer version of Bridgerton”. But when she started an MA in her home city of Belfast, that all changed, and her stint of going out-out began in earnest.

About three years later, when she was 25, O’Hare came up for air. She got cracking with writing Thirst Trap, which has been seven years in the making. The process began when she moved to Newcastle to do a PhD in the writings of 18th-century women, and found herself feeling homesick for Belfast. “It started out a bit disconnected and listless,” she says of the story, “and then as I grew up, it grew up alongside me. It turned into not just being about young women going on bad dates and having terrible hangovers in their twenties, but it was about approaching 30, and how your friendships and lives change at that moment.” Think Dolly Alderton, but with the sharp edges of Eliza Clark.

In today’s world, turning 30 is a momentous and much mythologised moment. There are endless online articles claiming that all the cigarettes you smoke before you turn 30 don’t really count – but that any after that age will certainly kill you. People have such big 30th-birthday parties, they almost feel like weddings. And older people keep telling you that, while you were anxious in your twenties, that all disappears when you hit the big three-oh. “It’s all a scam,” says O’Hare, laughing.

As she got older, O’Hare began to grieve for the friendships she’d had in her twenties. “There are so many losses and changes that you go through, with people going off and having kids or moving away, or just people changing. I felt a huge sense of grief when I stopped living with my best friend after five years, I was heartbroken.”

This feeling is encapsulated in the actual death of a friend in Thirst Trap. Lydia might not be living in the crumbling Belfast house anymore, but she lingers. She’s in the group photos on Roise’s dating profile. Her vibrator and lingerie collection are gathering dust in her bedroom. She’s still owed money by Harley, after she paid for her to go to London to have an abortion.

It was important to O’Hare to depict the “everyday stumblings upon things that reminded the girls of Lydia”.

“That is part of grief,” she continues. “It’s not like you just have this one emotional blowout after a death and then it’s a healing process that’s completely straightforward and linear.”

While the characters are navigating the loss, they are also feeling their way through womanhood. In one passage, Harley is out on the lash and meets a guy called Fergal. “About three hours later, they are on his sofa,” O’Hare writes, “Fergal squeezing her breast as though he is trying to wring out a sponge.” This encounter will be cringingly relatable for many. “I wanted that bit to reflect the kind of conversations you have with your friends afterwards,” says O’Hare now. “It can feel a bit alienating and isolating when something like that is actually happening, but then you can make light of it and cackle with your friends. Doing that brings a sense of agency back to it – even if it was a bad experience, it becomes a funny story.”

People are living in their overdrafts, and it’s for reasons that are very out of their control

Death isn’t the only difficult topic O’Hare navigates in the book. She also writes about disordered eating in the novel, with one character dealing with a bad day by overeating and then purging. O’Hare says it would have felt disingenuous to her to write about young women and not include it. “It’s something that most people I know struggle with,” she says.

Thirst Trap is also a very millennial tale. The women in this story are fed up of hen dos that cost £600 a head. They went to schools where Lynx Africa seeped from the armpit of every boy. They drink negroni sbagliatos. They injure themselves on their bedside cactuses. They sing Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” in nightclubs. And even though they’re in their thirties, they’re still living like students. “They have traded lectures for jobs and the cheapest wine in the off-licence with the second cheapest wine in the off-licence,” writes O’Hare.

As O’Hare was writing the book, there was an uptick in thirtysomethings living the student lifestyle, with the cost-of-living crisis putting people in a state of arrested development and forcing them to continue living in big house-shares for longer, or move back in with their parents. “People are living in their overdrafts,” says O’Hare. “And it’s for reasons that are very out of their control.” The author herself has graduated from living with numerous housemates and now has just the one: her boyfriend, who she lives with in Newcastle.

O’Hare still misses Belfast, and the city is a character itself in Thirst Trap. In the novel, she name-checks clubs that have since shut down, such as Filthy McNasty’s, and the dialogue is unmistakably Irish, with references to “notions” (crushes) and “rides” (hotties). “It just comes naturally to me when I’m writing dialogue,” she says. “I’m writing something at the minute that’s not set in Ireland, and I keep having to catch myself when I write a line like, ‘Oh, sure, you know yourself, like.’ Because I’m like, no, they wouldn’t say that, they’re from Sheffield.” It was also important to her that one of the women in the story had an Irish name: Roise, pronounced Row-shuh. Her own name, Gráinne, is pronounced Graw-nya.

She feels fortunate that her book is part of a “rising wave” of Irish stories set in Belfast, from Aimée Walsh’s Exile to Lucy Caldwell’s These Days. Not to mention a general boom in Irish literature off the back of Sally Rooney’s hit novels. “They’ve made me feel a bit more confident,” she smiles, “about being able to write about my little corner of the world that I’m from.”

Pan Macmillan publishes Thirst Trap’ by Gráinne O’Hare on 12 June 2025

Source: The Independent