I want to go home but I’m already there is a lit fic novel with a sprinkling of horror, if you go into this expecting out and out horror you will be disappointed.

The horror presented by Roisin Lanigan in this novel is the normal and the mundane. What haunts Aine, our protagonist, is the fact she has managed to sleep walk from her uni days to her mid-late twenties. To find her best friend might not be her best friend and they might just be friends because their rooms were next to each other at halls. The horror of moving in with your partner and discovering all their faults and becoming aware of your own, clawing to the cracks as that relationship starts to crumble.

Roisin Lanigan does an excellent job at bringing the characters and themes to life in this novel. In addition, to shining a spotlight on the London renting crisis and faceless landlords.

The writing style is best described as stream of consciousness, which will not be everyone’s cup of tea but I didn’t mind it and I felt it helped give the novel a decent pace.

I enjoyed the novel but feel I wasn’t exactly the target reader and the it didn’t fully resonate with me. I know there will be other people who will resonate more with the protagonist and this will be a 4+ star read for them.

I will read more by this author as I enjoyed the writing style and how real everything felt, from the descriptions of flat viewings to the words uttered during arguments.

I Want To Go Home But I'm Already There is a novel about the horrors of the housing crisis in London, as a young woman moves into a rental flat with her boyfriend and becomes convinced something is wrong with the flat. Áine has just moved into a flat in a nice area with her boyfriend, Elliot, pleased because their rent is affordable, but the flat seems different once they move in: damp, cold, and hostile. As she spends time in the flat working from home, or not working, it feels worse and worse, but Elliot doesn't seem to see it.

I was drawn in by the description of this book, combining the rental crisis with the 'young person's life is falling apart' genre of literary fiction and ghost story elements. That really is what the novel is, with the caveat that it is also very ambiguous and slow paced, playing with ideas of what kind of nightmare Áine is actually living. The atmosphere is perhaps the best thing about the book, sharply realised and accurate to the sense of dread that comes with hostile living conditions and a mental weariness that you cannot do anything about them (and, in this case, people don't even believe her about them). You can practically feel the mould growing as you read (and having lived in a mouldy flat in London, it gave terrible flashbacks).

Whilst reading, I couldn't tell if the book was going to have something big and decisive that would reveal whether this ghost story had a particular cause, otherworldly or mundane. It is more of an ambiguous narrative, not even delving into for example what Áine's Prescription that she often doesn't take is for. The effect of this is to leave you wondering, particularly around Áine and Elliot's relationship and how much either of them actually paid attention to the other one, and it does work well to explore the sense of being trapped that can take many different forms.

I enjoyed reading this book, though it did feel slow at times, and I liked that it took the genre that was around a lot a few years ago, with a young woman spiralling, and used it to focus on the housing crisis and how its impact goes far beyond just a place to live in. The ambiguity made sense, but I also felt like it lessened the ability to really explore the impact of the housing crisis on mental and physical health, with a vague, neat conclusion. I do think the book would be good if adapted for film or TV, as I feel the sense of dread would work well.

This is a horror story about renting which is to say that this is a story about renting. Áine & Elliot have just moved in together. Áine wasn’t entirely sold on the flat what with the weird basement emanating damp & creepy upstairs neighbours. But it’s a good step in their relationship!

The atmosphere here was so well crafted I felt like I was getting mould poisoning simply by reading. Áine is very in her head about a lot of things and we’re right there with her. But I mean she isn’t always wrong! And Elliott seems nonchalant & dismissive in a way that I would find frustrating.

I thought this was a really fresh and well done take on a story that isn’t new i.e. the breakdown of relationship.

I started off really enjoying the premise of this book. It's about a y0ung couple negotiating the London housing crisis and ending up in an old property with several issues, mainly the growing mould.

The book summary suggests it's a ghost story, but at the end we are left unsatisfied as several things are left unexplained, several knots not tied up.

Maybe the target market isn't me - maybe it would be better understood by someone going through this scenario, or having gone through this scenario.

thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an e-arc in exchange for an honest review! <3

’Loving her was like loving a haunted house’

I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There, is a depressingly brilliant, thought-provoking look at self-worth, love and loneliness in England’s housing crisis.

We follow a young-couple, Elliott and Áine, as they move into their new flat. Things take a turn for the worse, however, as Áine increasingly suspects the flat as being haunted, and Elliott does not. We watch them navigate work, their relationship and their social lives, all as the flat continues to grow an all-encompassing mould.

I knew the moment I picked up I Want To Go Home…. that I would love it. As a young person myself (about to finish uni, in my early 20’s) I found myself relating wholly to the couples experience in finding a house. The housing crisis in England is a truly horrifying thing for young people, one pock-marked with cruel land-lords, ever rising rents and a feeling that while you may be able to live in a ‘house’ you can never make it your home, you can never own your own little plot of land. Lanigan did a fantastic job at portraying this, with her witty remarks on the almost non-existent estate agent ‘Jack S’ and of course the dominant and almost oppressive nature of the nameless landlord. I love how these figures that dictate so much of our lives had such a menacing presence throughout the book. You don’t need to see your landlord every day to know they have a complete hold over your life, and I think Lanigan perfected this.

The highlight of this story, for me, was Áine. It’s been a long time since I’ve related so much to a book character that it honestly made me feel a little scared! Her imposter-syndrome, utter lack of self-worth and reliance on the idea that she is loved without knowing whether she loves someone back, was so captivating to me, as someone who feels all these emotions daily. The way that her and Elliott’s relationship was portrayed as imperfect was very important to show in a society, and economy, in which meaningful relationships are so hard to develop and grow.

While I Want To Go Home…. had some slower moments for me, it took me a little while to fully immerse myself in the story, this is such a worthwhile read.

Overall, I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There gets 4/5 stars.

Okay, I have so much to say about this book... Are you ready? Let's go!

Firstly, I'll start with the positives I did love Lanigan's writing style it was really clear and straight to the point. It felt delightfully conversational and real but still had a poetic element to it which I enjoyed. It did feel pretty sequential and other than the eeriness of the house, I knew exactly who each character was relatively quickly. The character descriptions were also perfectly specific and niche, for instance how Laura is described as someone who walks 'through life golden' - lovely description and creative too!

I also was a big fan of the sensory detail, for example the back of the car is described as still smelling 'vaguely of oil and potatoes' which once again is such a small detail that felt like it really screamed out at me from the page because of it is high relatability.

Áine is a really relatable character, she's messy in places but she felt fully formed as a character and had true grit to her. Elliotts character also seems so charming, thoughtful and fun - my opinion of him did change towards the end of the book but both Áine and Elliott were pretty likeable if not extraordinarily relatable.

As the book progressed, I feel like we got a front row seat to Áine and Elliott's relationship and the true colours of it. Their relationship did feel hollow and sometimes a situation of convenience/comfort at times which whilst feeling real was hard to read because they both seemed so unhappy and unsatisfied but like they were pretending not to be. Lanigan does a phenomenal job at capturing an insular and perhaps even codependent relationship even though at times it felt sad and difficult to muster through.

I also think Áine's character makes an absolutely stellar point that really resonated with me when reflecting on her relationship with Elliott. She can't tell whether him being 'the first person who had ever done things' for her was a sign of 'his goodness' or 'evidence of her own poor taste in men' - amen. This felt profound and made me think, so thank you Lanigan! This aside, I did find the unravelling of their relationship really unsatisfying and at times straight up depressing to witness which contributed to my overall rating for sure.

Elliott's caring nature towards Áine is initially charming but it evolves into almost an unhealthy power dynamic as the plot progresses. She compares the way he treats her to how one would treat 'a little plant' which did feel a little condescending and almost like Elliott saw her as weak or less than - which I'm not a fan of.

Similarly, I really liked Laura and Áine's friendship. It felt like they definitely grew apart after the move, which is understandable, but it felt like things got uglier than necessary and this was really sad to read. It felt like a lot of things slipped out of Áine's reach and it was borderline depressing to watch her closest friendship to be one of them.

The storytelling started off really strong, Lanigan is really talented at seamlessly weaving flashbacks into the plot to help give you a proper understanding of the characters, their dynamic but also the history of who they've been and the history of their relationships too. This is probably thanks in part to the writing, but it did feel pretty realistic - there was so much attention to detail it felt achingly genuine.

The writing read fast and had a lot of wit to it which helped break up the more depressing elements of the plot. There were weirdly creepy and eerie moments sprinkled throughout which added to the plot and definitely gave the whole thing some suspense and substance.

I think overall, the storytelling and writing style had such potential but the momentum and overall plot was too slow for me. Whilst the relationships all felt real and relatable, the overall tone was consistently too depressing and dire for me to really enjoy. Also a final point, it is stated in the book that ready salted is the best crisp flavour, this doesn't affect my review of the book as a whole but I strongly strongly disagree.

This was so up my street.

Aine moves into a flat with her boyfriend and thinks it might be haunted. She watched the mould crawl up the walls and is convinced there’s something in the basement. Her boyfriend Elliott doesn’t believe her and neither does her best friend Laura.

As Aine starts to unravel we’re left to wonder, is her flat haunted? Is she imagining things? Is the mould killing them?

This isn’t really a horror and not really a ghost story, and is more like a classic messy woman surviving in london’s housing crisis. It was very for me.

4 stars.

An intense, cramped, and psychologically challenging book. A study on relationships, fear, and the housing crisis that will resonate with anyone who has lived in a large city. This book, which is eerie, unnerving, and keenly observed, encapsulates the spirit of our times with witty commentary on the real estate market, class differences, and financial concerns that can turn many people's life into living hell. An intriguing new voice in the literary world, Roisin Lanigan makes a strong start.

Argh, I wanted to love this, I really did. The premise was excellent and the start was strong, but so much of the story skirted around stuff without delivering the goods. A lot of the writing was nice, but ultimately it just all felt like vibes and aesthetics without any substance. This was sold as a horror novel, and the setup was absolutely there…but it all just fizzled out and left me frustrated. Shame!

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the ARC.

Aine lives in London with her BFF; Laura, but they’re growing up and on now and move in with their respective partners. Whilst Laura seems to have it all, a houseboat, plenty of social media content and an engagement, for Aine it’s all going very wrong. The flat she rents with her partner, Elliot; is seemingly cursed, the odd couple upstairs, the unending mould, the flat seeps in misery and she seems to be the only one deeply affected.

I felt this book was a tad too long, Aine’s obsession with the mould and upstairs neighbours wore on me. I wanted Aine to confront Laura about Moon and Cian seemed a bit of a waste of a character. Despite the detail throughout it felt empty, like I hadn’t really read anything.

Thank you for this ARC.

I loved this book. An intense, claustrophobic and yet unemotional read. A study in anxiety, relationships and the housing crisis that anyone who has spent time living in a big city will be able to relate to (with no hint of preachiness about it). There isn’t much plot but that’s kind of the point - the banal details of daily life somehow rendered interesting by the detailed descriptions and occasional flashes of drama. A slow-burn that gnaws at you. Unsettling, but an excellent novel for it.

This is a book that I wanted to like, but it fell short and I’m not sure why. Aine moves to London with her boyfriend and they rent a flat. But all’s not well and that’s part of the problem, I think. Is Aine unwell and suffering a mental health crisis? Is her relationship floundering? Is the flat haunted by ghosts or is it just wild imaginings? Is the whole story a 21st century allegorical tale about a twenty something’s aimless search for meaning?

I’m lost because it touches on all these aspects but doesn’t fulfil any of them in a satisfactory way. As an older reader, maybe I’m the wrong target market. I didn’t feel any great empathy for her predicament and I was hoping, I think, for more of a ghostly slant to the story. It is well written and there’s some humour but I struggled to finish it and was left disappointed.

I loved the premise of this book but struggled with the pacing. Lanigan created a good atmosphere of malaise but I felt mental health struggles were drip-teased throughout and then never followed up on which made it difficult to understand whether Lanigan intended this as a mental health story or horror and I found myself distracted by this question throughout.

The long, often largely eventless chapters meant I paced myself by reading them one at a time then taking a break and there was a sense of repetitiveness which made me occasionally hesitant to want to pick this back up. There wasn't enough of a a climax and it just sort of fizzled out into a happy ending with a "or was it all sinister all along" thrown in which didn't pique my curiosity as it simply came too late.

I feel this could have been a brilliant short story or novella but there wasn't enough substance for an entire novel.

A beautifully written atmospheric novel about Áine's search for 'home'. Moving in with her boyfriend because her friend and flatmate has bought a houseboat, the dream quickly turns sour as she is faced with the reality of co-habitation and the horrors of London's rental market. The books blurs reality and anxious imagination really well, the disquiet oozes off the pages. The characters make this novel, each expertly drawn and complex showing the complexity of the rapidly changing life that is your 20s. A stunning read, very engrossing.

Nice idea thinking about modern, young, urban and precarious lives as a kind of ghost story but I found the writing flat and the details mundane. This may well be deliberate given Aine's 'prescription' that she doesn't take but it made reading this a struggle.

I also think this will appeal to twenty somethings as so much about this feels to be tapping into a generational malaise: aimless, drifting lives; a desire for a relationship just because is the next step in some kind of template; loneliness exacerbated by Aine's own decision to work from home full time because she's too exhausted to commute every day; friendships falling by the wayside.

The atmosphere is deadened and claustrophobic, indicative of Aine's interiority.

oh i LOVED this! super atmospheric, creepy, and anxiety-inducing. scarily relatable at points (hello upstairs neighbours from hell 👋🏻) excited to read more work from róisín lanigan!

I’ve had to think long and hard to decide what I want to say about this book. Not because I didn’t like it (I liked it a lot), but because it’s a dense and circuitous story that’s difficult to pin down – something that’s unlikely to be clear from a summary of the plot. In fact, if I sum up I Want to Go Home But I’m Already There, it might sound pretty straightforward. Áine is a twentysomething Irish woman in London who’s just moved in with her boyfriend Elliott. While the move was born out of necessity, they seem to have hit the jackpot with their new flat: it’s affordable, quiet, in a ‘good’ area, and even has a garden. Áine, however, struggles to feel at home there, growing increasingly uneasy: about the persistent mould, the creepy upstairs neighbour, and, more broadly, the discomfort of inhabiting a space that isn’t truly hers.

The book grabbed my attention partly because of its perfect one-line pitch: ‘a ghost story set in the rental crisis’. I commend whoever managed to come up with that, because it’s actually very hard to categorise. If this novel is any kind of ghost story, it’s an existential one.

Put another way: Áine and Elliott finding an affordable flat in a leafy London suburb is such a fantasy that it can only be, underneath that, a horror story. It’s the inherent uncanniness of living in places that don’t belong to you: the destabilising effect of frequent moves, rising prices, poor conditions, all the limitations those things place on the rest of your life. It’s also the story of the disintegration of a relationship in which nothing is really wrong, and yet, everything is. You could even argue it’s a story about depression. The atmosphere is suffocatingly mundane, filled with long, inert stretches of life that feel just slightly off, a quality it shares with books like Janice Galloway's The Trick is to Keep Breathing (with its sense of numbness) and Kiare Ladner's Nightshift (for the London alienation).

Formally, though, I found it closest to a bunch of books I’ve read that were originally published in the 90s or 2000s, like Helen Smith’s Alison Wonderland, Matt Thorne’s Tourist and Cherry, and Scarlett Thomas’s Lily Pascale novels. These are all books that were positioned as being ‘about’ something (usually some sort of mystery) but are really a lot baggier than that. They’re filled with highly detailed writing about quotidian things, an approach that immerses us in the world of the character, so we’re taken along with them whatever happens, whether banal or fantastical. Too readable to be ‘literary’, too character-led to be ‘genre’, too plotless to be ‘commercial’, they don’t fit into any modern marketing category.

This is a class of novel that I didn’t think existed any more; it’s a genuinely pleasant surprise to encounter one in the wild. At the same time, because I Want to Go Home... takes this freewheeling, discursive approach, I’ve found it very difficult to articulate why I liked it. It can be a little too baggy: there are some episodes (the dog??) that could have been cut in their entirety without making any difference to the story overall. Then again, if Áine sometimes feels too passive, too stuck in her own inertia – that’s kind of the point. And if I’ve rambled on too much about all this in my review... well, that very much suits the book.

This one took a while to read, with long chapters that dragged the further I got into the book. I didn't hate it but I also didn't love it. I did enjoy the main story topics, however.

2.5

Oh, I really enjoyed this! It's a strange little book, and hard to really explain, but it's fun and humorous in a very specific way that works for me. The prose is a bit dense at times, but if you don't mind details and descriptions of mundane life, it should work for you. If you're a young person feeling like the world has tossed you around both emotionally and otherwise, this will resonate.

Aine decides to move in with her boyfriend, Elliott, because her best friend and flatmate Laura is buying a houseboat with her own partner. It just makes sense for them to move in together - right? Aine loves Elliott, he’s so different from every boy who has come before, but she’s not sure she loves him in the right way. They find a miraculous London flat within their budget, but quickly discover growing mould, and an oppressive unseen presence weighing on every moment Aine spends there.

This story takes place over the course of a year - the one year tenancy agreement that Aine and Elliott signed. It’s a witty and biting commentary on both the horrific London rental market (help, I’m there too) and trying to date in your 20s and 30s in the city. Aine feels everyone around her moving on with their lives, doing things that she’s not even sure she wants to do, but feels like she needs to be moving towards. There’s an emptiness and unease within her relating to her unfulfilled life, and she projects her anxieties and depression that are the fallout of knowing something is fundamentally wrong.

Frustratingly, Aine is not a very likeable character. I don’t think that matters to the story - so maybe that’s the point. She has a lot of terrible opinions, and you know from the jump that she’s an unreliable narrator, as there are certain things she gives zero details about. Her mystery “Prescription” for one - her mental and physical illnesses that progress throughout the book only lead to more issues, but she only goes to the doctor once, and ignores what they say. Laura and Elliott seem to do pretty much everything for her, and I have no idea how she supposedly stayed employed, given it seemed like she was never even logged into her laptop, let alone doing any work. Elliott, Laura & Cian are much more interesting characters, but we only ever see them through Aine’s very wonky point of view.

The ghost story portion of the plot is not the horror part. The horror is the above, the requirement to live an unfulfilling adult life in a mouldy flat with someone you don’t really love, but you don’t feel like there’s much alternative to. I spent the majority of the book assuming Aine was just going through some kind of psychosis and/or hallucinations, rather than ever humouring the idea that there might be a ‘real’ ghost.

The writing is really great, but the narrative certainly loses its way at times, and I felt myself just growing bored if not despondent as Aine trudged through her awful life. This book is definitely worth a read, and I think it will really find a place with a lot of people, but I think it was a bit much for me. A 3.5 star - glad I read it, but I won’t be reading it again.