Eimear McBride | The City Changes Its Face
Sun 27 Apr 2025 | 2:00pm - 3:00pm



A new novel from Eimear McBride is always an event, and The City Changes Its Face is no exception – an intense, lyrical exploration of love, obsession, and the passage of time.
It’s 1995 in Camden, and inside a small flat, twenty-year-old Eily and forty-year-old Stephen exist in the fevered haze of new love—bodies tangled, sheets unmade, the city rushing past their window. But eighteen months later, everything has shifted. Love has collided with reality. Stephen’s teenage daughter has returned, and Eily has made a choice that will change everything.
Now, on a rain-drenched London night, the two lovers retrace the course of their relationship, searching for what has been lost. Can they find their way back to each other, or will the weight of unspoken emotions, buried secrets, and unmet ambitions pull them apart?
With her trademark intensity and poetic precision, McBride delivers a searing, intimate portrait of passion, jealousy, and the relentless tide of time.
In conversation with Tom Gatti
Venue: Old Divinity School
Duration: 1 hour
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Author Biography
Eimear McBride is the author of four novels: A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, The Lesser Bohemians, Strange Hotel and The City Changes Its Face. She held the inaugural Creative Fellowship at the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading, which resulted in the performance text ‘Mouthpieces.’ Her full length, non-fiction work Something Out of Place: Women & Disgust was published in 2021. In 2022, she wrote and directed A Very Short Film About Longing (DMC Films/BBC), which screened in the 2023 London Film Festival. She is the recipient of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, Goldsmiths Prize, Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, among others. She lives in London.
Chair Biography
Tom Gatti is acting editor at the New Statesman, where Long Players began life as a feature. He joined the magazine in 2013 as culture editor; before that he was Saturday Review editor at The Times, where he also wrote book reviews, features and interviews. From 1995 to the present, he has listened to Radiohead’s The Bends more times than is strictly necessary.