The Rachel Incident is aching with unrequited love, shot through with delicious, sparkling humour about friends, lovers, Ireland in chaos, and a young woman desperately trying to manage all three…Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it is love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate, and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork City, trying to maintain a bohemian existence while the threat of the financial crash looms before them. When Rachel falls in love with her married professor, Dr Fred Byrne, James helps her devise a reading at their local bookstore, with the goal that she might seduce him afterwards. But Fred has other desires. So begins a series of secrets and compromises that intertwine the fates of James, Rachel, Fred, and Fred's glamorous, well-connected wife Deenie.
