In The Cost of Living, the second installment of her Living Autobiography, Deborah Levy describes a conversation she witnessed in a bar on Colombia’s Caribbean coast between a young English woman and an older American man. The woman is relating how she had diced with death while scuba diving, but the story was also, Levy says, about “some sort of undisclosed hurt.” When the woman pauses to confirm if the man is following the allegory, her companion says: “You talk a lot, don’t you?”

“It had not occurred to him that she might not consider herself to be the minor character and him the major character,” Levy says. “She had unsettled a boundary, collapsed a social hierarchy, broken with the usual rituals.” Megan Nolan’s debut novel, Acts of Desperation, is overrun with its narrator’s — and its author’s — consciousness of unsettling this same boundary. “I cannot speak about these things too soon because their names alone summon like a charm the disinterest of an enlightened reader,” she observes. “Female suffering is cheap and is used cheaply by dishonest women who are looking for attention — and of all our cardinal sins, seeking attention must surely be up there.” The dual meaning of “disinterest” is key, here: Nolan is concerned — though perhaps sardonically — not only about her audience switching off, but also about them adopting a standpoint of detached neutrality when sitting in judgement.

Born in Waterford, Ireland, Nolan dropped out of university in Dublin. She worked in service-sector jobs before being able to support herself on income from writing. And as well as the self-consciousness of her voice, this feeds into a class consciousness, too. Acts of Desperation is peppered with small realizations of the ubiquity of class’s definitive nature: nepotism in the job market, the unspoken rules of living, and material constraints which the wealthy have simply never noticed.