Join Susannah Dickey and Nicole Flattery in conversation as they discuss their most recent books, Common Decency (2022) and Nothing Special (2023). Writing in deft, wry and witty voices about love, regret, desire and coming of age, these two writers navigate the novel in complex and strange ways.
Nicole’s Nothing Special tells the story of a young woman, Mae, entering the complex world of Andy Warhol’s Factory and coming of age in 1960s New York. When Mae drops out of school she is hired, quite accidentally, as a typist in the Factory, and upon finding this world discovers friendship, independence, and the surreal subculture of the moment.
Susannah’s Common Decency follows the lives of two women living in the same building, each wrestling the sorrows and spectres of love and loss. Lily has recently lost her mother and is struggling with the concept of life without her; Siobhán is entangled in an affair with a married man. The ways in which their lives intertwine will shock and surprise to the end.Duration 1 hour
Nicole Flattery’s work has been published in The London Review of Books, The Stinging Fly, The White Review, The Dublin Review, the New York Times, Sight&Sound Magazine, Winter Papers and the 2019 Faber anthology of new Irish writing. Her story “Track” won the 2017 White Review Short Story Prize, and her story “Parrot” won the Irish Book Awards Story of the Year prize in 2019. Her first book, the story collection SHOW THEM A GOOD TIME, won the 2020 London Magazine Prize for Debut Fiction and the Kate O’Brien Award.
Susannah Dickey is a writer from Derry. She is the author of two novels, Tennis Lessons (2020) and Common Decency (2022), both published by Doubleday UK and Penguin Ireland. Her debut poetry collection, ISDAL, will be published in September 2023 by Picador.
