3.5 stars

Áine and Elliot's first (rented) home together should be perfect. It's by far the best they've viewed, though the bar isn't high. But it doesn't take long for the shine to dim, with the creeping chill, the growing mould, the sense of dread spreading from the cellar and from the neighbours upstairs.

There's something genius about rendering the horrors of renting property into an actual horror story. At least for Áine, whose growing disquiet and dislocation cast her as an unreliable narrator. The sense of unreality and uncertainty as she tries to convince her increasingly frustrated friend and boyfriend is well done.

The creeping unease that diffuses the book is beautifully done but it is oppressive and a little repetitive. A more thorough edit would have really honed it into something sharper and more effective.

This book was so full of atmosphere, a slightly creepy and unsettling tale of modern life that really got under my skin.

Aine isn't necessarily a character that you will love, but she is someone that a lot of people will see themselves in. On paper her life seems perfect, she has what she thought she wanted. A decent job, a partner who loves her, a flat in an area of london they can afford with a nice local at the end of the road. But something underneath it all doesnt feel quite right.

Feeling unsettled in your own life is something that a lot of people will resonate with. A brilliantly out together debut.

I really enjoyed the concept and themes of the book. The characters were super engaging and the decent into madness for the main character really added to the horror. I felt complete anxiety reading this at the decisions I thought the character could make. I was literally gasping and having to put the book down to breathe.

I thought the lack of a tangible ghostfigure and a not well executed merge of folk and ghost, lacked some spookiness that would have enhanced the horror genre.

Thank you to #netgalley for this ARC.

3.5

The title pulled me in — it promised something raw, disoriented, maybe even haunting. And while there are glimpses of emotion and some beautifully bleak lines, they’re buried beneath vague abstractions and repetition. It felt like reading the same thought loop over and over again, without ever quite landing anywhere.
If you like poetic existentialism with no clear plot or characters, this might work for you. But for me, it lacked depth and clarity.

Raw, relatable, and beautifully written 🏠💭. I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There captures the complicated emotions of longing, belonging, and the search for home. Róisín Lanigan’s writing is lyrical and honest, exploring themes of identity, place, and inner conflict. I found myself deeply moved by the introspection and heartfelt observations. It’s perfect for anyone navigating life transitions or questioning where they truly belong.

Róisín Lanigan is definitely an author to watch! This is a very ambitious first novel that attempts to reckon with what the gothic might look like today. It feels that she’s taken the typical Sally Rooney tropes and moved them on within a new genre that successfully blends literary tradition within a more modern linguistic framework. I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There is in essence a novel about the end of a relationship that begins to haunt the flat the two main characters are living in. It feels as much a meditation about modern relationships as about female independence and there’s a blend of the supernatural and the heavily realistic that establishes Lanigan as a unique writer and thinker.

Literary horror-lite filled with creeping unease
—
The Romans believed in the concept of genius loci, the spirit of a place, and a number of recently released novels have been imbued with the history and the ghosts of a location, for after all, every place where we live has been the home of countless hundreds and thousands before us. Perhaps their spirits linger, and they continue to influence the waking world.

Áine and her boyfriend find the perfect flat in a bougie part of London, getting the place for a steal. To be honest, Aine’s hand is forced into taking a first step into adulthood when her flatmate and best friend buys a place with her boyfriend, and so Áine does the next thing on her expected life ladder. On the surface, the flat seems to be perfect for her and Elliot, but when they actually move in, Áine can’t help but notice the things that aren’t quite right: draughts from no discernible source, the unceasing cold, the oddness of the upstairs neighbour, and other unexplainable phenomena. Unable to define exactly what’s wrong with the flat, Áine and Elliot’s relationship deteriorates, the external unease and her internal anxieties beginning to meld together, until things take their toll on Áine and their relationship.

Billed as ‘a ghost story set in the rental crisis,’ the urban horror bits are too slight to really linger, and perhaps the allusive nature of Áine’s mental health issues make this a book that’s not quite certain what it wants to be. Literary fiction? Sad girl lit? Urban horror? Trying to be a little of all those but without putting a definitive stamp on any one made this a bit of a slog to read. The creeping unease leaks out of the book but the lack of engagement between Áine and Elliot made this a bit of a wasted opportunity.

Want to Go Home but I’m Already There by Róisín Lanigan was one of those books that has a hypnotic quality and never quite goes where you think it’s was going to, so really keeps you hooked. When I saw it described as a type of ghost story, type of contemporary fiction, I was in.

The wonderful cover art caught my eye initially and now having read I Want to Go Home but I’m Already There – I feel it sums up the overall tone so well. At first glance I just thought it was depicting a melting candle, but then saw they were actually figures hugging (while melting) and that made me love it even more.

Áine and her boyfriend, Elliot have just moved into their first flat together, in London, and from the beginning, things are a little off.

She previously lived with her friend Laura, who has now bought a houseboat with her boyfriend, in a bid to get on the property ladder (as you do). As the weeks progress, Áine becomes convinced that there is some sort of ghost in the flat, it very much starts to affect her mental health. As Elliot is not on the same page as her with this, it affects their relationship too. Her whole life flips and she has to try and navigate this new reality.

What I Want to Go Home but I’m Already There does so well while you’re reading it is blur the lines between reality and Aine’s take on things. It’s a commentary on gaslighting and the pressures put on people in today’s society, as well as, well, maybe some places just are haunted?

I also really enjoyed the writing style – dry, witty with astute observations about modern life, while delivering on the ambiguity too. This book is multi-layered and intriguing, I was hooked and still find myself thinking about it days after reading.

Róisín Lanigan's debut novel "I Want to Go Home But I'm Already There" presents an introspective exploration of alienation, identity, and mental health through protagonist Áine's unravelling reality after moving into a bleak flat with her boyfriend, Elliott. Although the novel offers insightful commentary on mental illness, accompanying guilt, and the journey toward authentic selfhood, the novel struggles to create a deep emotional connection with readers.

The seemingly haunted flat serves as both setting and metaphor, mirroring Áine's deteriorating mental state and growing disconnection. This spatial symbolism effectively represents her self-alienation and illness, creating the novel's most compelling element. The damp walls, persistent cold, and strange noises become extensions of Áine's psychological fragmentation, blurring the line between external reality and internal perception.

However, Áine remains somewhat inaccessible—her descent into isolation and paranoia is portrayed with quiet intensity and her internal landscape often feels remote. We witness her withdrawal from friends, her increasing physical symptoms, and her growing disconnect from Elliott, yet the emotional core driving these changes remains frustratingly out of reach.

The narrative may reflect Áine's own disconnection from herself, but it creates a barrier to reader empathy. Moreover, the supporting characters function primarily as narrative devices rather than fully realised individuals, remaining one-dimensional despite their significance to Áine's story. Several narrative threads remain unresolved, creating a sense of incompleteness, and the emotional distance maintained throughout may leave readers emotionally unfulfilled.

The novel thoughtfully examines how physical spaces shape our sense of belonging and identity, suggesting that "home" is as much a psychological construct as a physical location. The narrative also offers a nuanced portrayal of how mental health struggles can distort one's perception of reality without resorting to simplistic explanations or solutions.

While Lanigan's thematic ambitions show promise, the novel's execution doesn't consistently deliver on its potential. "I Want to Go Home But I'm Already There" ultimately presents a thoughtful meditation on belonging and identity but falls short of the emotional resonance it might have achieved.

Lanigan's haunting novel 'I Want To Go Home But I'm Already There' is an aching portrayal of what it means to be uncomfortable in your own life. Anxiety radiates from this book in a way that makes it difficult to put down, and I found myself rooting for the MC to touch some grass and get out of there.

Enjoyable gothic story about renting and relationships in London. It's also very funny and pin point accurate in descriptions of living our lives in the constant bubble of instagram. It raises questions about the precarious nature of renting substandard properties and the huge strain that puts on mental health. There are wonderful descriptions of mould! And the novel reaches its inevitable conclusion on a note of calm acceptance.

Thanks for this ARC!
I DNF'ed after chapter 2. Not because I wasn't enjoying myself or because I thought it was a bad book, in fact, it was the opposite. I thought it was really well written but the descriptions of the damp house did not vibe with me haha, I'm a baby and cannot read scary books.
So I will be giving this book 5 stars for making me feel so much after two chapters and I kind of wish I could have read more because I want to know what happens to Áine and Laura and Elliott and especially how Áine's reaction to the house will affect these relationships. And who is the scary man upstairs??
I might give this another try when I'm somewhere on a beach on a hot day, far away from my own place haha.

3.75 stars

My thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC!

Exit Management by Naomi Booth meets Paradise Rot or any other drippy, mouldy, nasty little horror book you’ve read recently. I really liked this one a lot, it kept me hooked, played on my own anxieties, and felt like a modern horror novel for the renters’ age. I liked the way Lanigan played with very mundane, real fears like dodgy neighbours, uncaring landlords, mould, and merged them with a tinge of the supernatural. It results in a novel that’s unpleasant to read at times, which is the intended goal.

The ending let the book down as a whole for me. There’s an awful scene with a dog that made me too sad - please leave your dogs out of the horror 😭 The tension had been ramped up all the way through, like a balloon overfilled with air, and I was expecting something more akin to a pop, but instead it was like all the air just slowly leaked out.

I’d say the rest of the book is still strong enough that I’d recommend it, but yes, I did want something else from the ending.

I had high hopes for this book as so many people had been raving about how good it was, but for me, it just fell a bit short on what I had been expecting. The writing was good and the unravelling of Ainé's experience was done really well, it was both uncomfortable and unnerving.
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the chance to read this ARC.

The haunted house as a metaphor for grief, or abuse, or mental illness, or anything else, is really nothing new, and for people who read and watch a lot of horror I think it’s become a little stale at this point. It would be easy to lump I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There into that category and to dismiss it as a result of that, but I think there’s a lot more going on here and that would be a real shame.

The first thing to say about I Want To Go Home… is that it’s brilliantly written. The characters feel like people I know and have known, and it’s very keenly observed. It taps into a very specific generational issue around housing insecurity that I’d guess anybody younger than 40 in the UK has suffered through, and a lot of the time I felt like I was reading a biography of my own life. It’s often laugh-out-loud funny, and that does a great job of making the creeping dread that slowly builds over the course of the year in which we follow our protagonists feel even more impactful.

I suspect that a common criticism of this book will come from people who went in expecting a horror novel and got a piece of literary fiction. I’d argue that it is still a horror novel, but the supernatural element - the haunting - takes a back seat to the much more mundane horrors of being a Millennial (or maybe even Gen Z at this point) trying to live in London and maintain any sort of quality of life.

Personally, I liked the fact that the haunting is subtle and largely ambiguous. While you could certainly read this as a metaphor for mental health issues, the doubt that this ambiguity creates - is the haunting real? is it all in Áine’s head? - brought a depth to the novel that I really appreciated. At one point in the novel Áine reflects on the time that she took her boyfriend to Ireland to meet her parents, and how he reacted with scorn and amusement to the stories of the banshees that have plagued her family. She tells him that he isn’t a believer. She is. The ambiguity of the haunting is asking us to decide whether we’re non-believers like Elliot, or whether we see ourselves in Áine.

I really enjoyed this and would absolutely recommend picking it up.

Áine should be feeling happy with her life. She’s just moved in with Elliot. Their new flat is in an affluent neighbourhood, surrounded by bakeries, yoga studios and organic vegetable shops. They even have a garden. And yet, from the moment they move in, Áine can't shake the sense that there's something not quite right about the place...

It's not just the humourless estate agent and nameless it's the chill that seeps through the draughty windows; the damp spreading from the cellar door; the way the organic fruit and veg never lasts as long as it should. And most of all, it's the upstairs neighbours, whose very existence makes peaceful coexistence very difficult indeed.

The longer Áine spends inside the flat - pretending to work from home; dissecting messages from the friends whose lives seem to have moved on without her - the less it feels like home. And as Áine fixates on the cracks in the ceiling, it becomes harder to ignore the cracks in her relationship with Elliott...

Brilliantly observed and darkly funny, I Want to Go Home But I’m Already There is a ghost story set in the rental crisis. A wonderfully clear-eyed portrait of loneliness, loss and belonging, it examines what it means to feel at home.

I loved it so much I purchased a copy when it came out! I enjoy Irish writers and how you can almost touch the words they use to create the world they build.

This novel fits very well with a new very hyper specific subtrope of the unsound women trope and that is 'young woman at the absolute end of her tether begins to self-destruct her otherwise stable life'. The experience of reading this book was the same as when you get to scratch an itch that was plaguing you but there was no way you can take your shoes off in public so you had to live with it for under your clothes for while before sweet itchy privacy. Which is a long way of saying, it was rewarding! The title alone is so evocative, so image 200+ pages of that. But I'd say if you can't relate to the title, then this might be a struggle. This book was very similar to 'Homesick' by Silvia Saunders, another 2025 release, and now in my headcannon, the two leads have met, have a houseshare and are loving it.

I would absolutely live in a haunted flat if it was in a nice part of London.
Not entirely certain this should be marketed as horror, it’s more ‘unsettling modern fiction’, but an excellent read.

3.75 stars

Áine is in a period of new beginnings in her life. She is moving in with her boyfriend, Elliot, for the first time and experiencing a new way of living without her long-term roommate and friend. They find a flat in an upmarket neighbourhood, and despite Áine's spoken and unspoken reservations, they're moving in before they know it. Áine is immediately unsettled, by the unwelcoming upstairs neighbours, the unhelpful real estate agent, the ominous cellar, the chill that seeps into every corner, and the omnipresent mold spreading without cause. Áine sprials further into melancholy with every day spent in the flat, but with a partner who brushes off her concerns and nowhere else to go, she resigns herself to wait out the lease.

As the title suggests, this book explores the concept of what makes a home and how we grow around our environment. I really related to Áine and I loved she adapted and changed over the course of the book, gradually at first and then in a crescendo. She has great dry wit and I saw myself in a lot of her attitudes towards her partner, domesticity, friendships and work. Through Áine, the author offers commentary on coming-of-age when things aren't going well and I will read that all day everyday. Elliot is a fantastic companion character to Áine because they contrast well against one another and he's the kind of man everyone has met and can probably join in Áine's disdain to some extent. Áine's relationships outside of her newfound domestic bliss are strained across the board, including her newly estranged bestie-turned-houseboat-renovator who has become wrapped up in her own relationship and left Áine behind. The author does a great job of putting multiple forces to work to keep Áine inside the house and thus worsen her situation.

I have no idea why but I did find this quite a slog to get through for the first 2/3 or so (the end I devoured) and I often found myself only reading 5-10 pages at a time. I think it could have hit its peak sooner because there was a lot of repetition in the first half and this involved the point just be remade over and over again with little new information being added. This is described as 'a ghost story set in the rental crisis' and I feel this may set unrealistic expectations. Early on there is a super creepy ghost story moment that gave me goosebumps and I couldn't wait for more, which I sadly didn't get. It has a wonderfully eerie atmosphere but I was waiting for something else to happen and it rarely did. I appreciate literary horror because it's not as on the nose as classic horror but I just think this book didn't live up to its potential. The tagline also sets you up for a good laugh (in my opinion) and if you pick it up for that reason alone you'll be let down. There's some great wit sprinkled throughout but the tagline almost sounds sitcom-y??

Overall I really enjoyed the writing and how erratic this book is. I would be very interested in reading more from this author.