Ordinary human failings
It’s 1990 in London and Tom Hargreaves has it all: a burgeoning career as a reporter, fierce ambition and a brisk disregard for the « peasants » – ordinary people, his readers, easy tabloid fodder. His star looks set to rise when he stumbles across a scoop: a dead child on a London estate, grieving parents loved across the neighbourhood, and the finger of suspicion pointing at one reclusive family of Irish immigrants and « bad apples »: the Greens.
At their heart sits Carmel: beautiful, otherworldly, broken, and once destined for a future beyond her circumstances until life – and love – got in her way. Crushed by failure and surrounded by disappointment, there’s nowhere for her to go and no chance of escape. Now, with the police closing in on a suspect and the tabloids hunting their monster, she must confront the secrets and silences that have trapped her family for so many generations.
Ordinary human failings is a sad and painful exploration of everything that can go wrong in a poor immigrant family. It takes place in 1990s London and follows an Irish family, after the youngest child, a ten-year-old girl, is taken into custody for possibly killing a toddler from the same neighbourhood. Points of view alternate…