Paris Syndrome by Lucy Sweeney Byrne

“The book is consistently exciting, invigorating, challenging, surprising. It’s also very funny, Sweeney Byrne mining bright diamonds of humour from the black mud of her anxiety, suffering and morbid boredom. And she writes brilliantly”

“Sweeney Byrne manages to capture the optimism of someone with the world at their fingertips, yet wary about the vastness before her.”

“Sharp, insightful, funny; the whole collection is so believable, so astute, that at times it’s easy to forget that you’re reading fiction ... Paris Syndrome is an exciting and accomplished read”

“Paris Syndrome reads as radically contemporary. The battles that Lucy fights are those familiar to millennial readers ... Sweeney Byrne’s acerbic wit marks her apart.”

“Full of vitality and precision, and so rawly funny – this is a fabulous debut.”

“The voice is hugely self-aware, unafraid of turning her sharp light inward ... the details are vivid and the atmosphere tense throughout.”

“Harrowing and hilarious in equal measures – and often, somehow, at the same time – Paris Syndrome is an unforgettable portrait of millennial womanhood.”

“Fearless and wryly funny, the stories in Paris Syndrome are a finely calibrated mix of rage and wonder.”

“A feisty portrayal of the bleakness of modern life, full of fruitless longing, misplaced knowing and black irony.”

“Lucy Sweeney Byrne’s short stories achieve what the best in that robust form aspire to: transport us to worlds hitherto unknown, in company strange, and with a tingling sense of dread, giddiness, and awe.”

“The stories in Paris Syndrome are fresh and restless … Lucy Sweeney Byrne’s youthful protagonists face down the paradox of experiencing for the first time a world that feels, this late in history, terminally secondhand.”

“Gripping and beautiful, Paris Syndrome is spiced with the tang of many places, but it’s through the territory of the human soul that it ventures most bravely. It doesn’t just give you the world, it presents a universe.”

“With its tone of appalled hilarity, its roving portraiture of twentysomething lostness, and its narrator’s youthfully cruel perceptions – often turned squarely on herself – Paris Syndrome is an addictive, keeps-you-up-till-the-birds-are-singing read.”

“These stories of escape from the self, of detachment, of unnamed yearning, remind me of the work of Patti Smith and of John McGahern’s The Pornographer.”

“In Paris Syndrome, Lucy Sweeney Byrne manages to capture both the weariness and optimism of the eternal traveller. Whilst these stories are stunningly well-observed portraits of the unfamiliar, exotic and occasionally threatening communities briefly inhabited by the protagonists, they are, at heart, meditations on home, belonging and self. Each one explores, with unflinching honesty, what it means to be truly present in a place.”

“Lucy Sweeney Byrne captures the absurdity, passion and disabused hope encountered in work, love and travel in this vivid chronicle of a woman navigating a way through her twenties – that most disillusioning of the decades. Paris Syndrome explores a world where everything is possible except for permanency; where intensity and identity are fleeting, but where connection is still, in spite of it all, imperative.”