Lisa McInerney likes the rule of three. Three novels set in Cork structured around sex, drugs and rock’n’roll and, within that, ‘smoke, coke and yokes [ecstasy], St Paddy’s modern trinity’. The Rules of Revelation follows her debut, The Glorious Heresies (winner of the 2016 Women’s Prize; in its focus on the relationship between teenagers Ryan and Karine, it represents the sex component) and its sequel, The Blood Miracles (drugs, 2017). It reprises Glorious Heresies’ movement between multiple characters, Ryan Cusack (centre of Blood Miracles) seen through them.
Ryan has returned to Cork, where bad blood waits for him, barely congealed and threatening, darkly, to ooze out at any moment. Ostensibly he’s back to make an album (hence rock’n’roll) with his band Lord Urchin, but it also means a home-coming to Karine and their infant son, and hopes for a return to, or a development of, the heart-rending first love they stumbled through in Glorious Heresies.
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