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Nothing Special
A wildly original debut novel about two young women navigating the complex worlds of Andy Warhol's Factory, and coming of age in 1960s New York
New York City, 1966. Seventeen-year-old Mae lives in a run-down apartment with her alcoholic mother and her mother's sometimes-boyfriend, Mikey. She is turned off by the petty girls at her high school, and the sleazy men she typically meets. When she drops out, she is presented with a job offer that will remake her world entirely: she is hired as a typist for the artist Andy Warhol.
Warhol is composing an unconventional novel by recording the conversations and experiences of his many famous and alluring friends. Tasked with transcribing these tapes alongside several other girls, Mae quickly befriends Shelley and the two of them embark on a surreal adventure at the fringes of the countercultural movement. Going to parties together, exploring their womanhood and sexuality, this should be the most enlivening experience of Mae's life. But as she grows increasingly obsessed with the tapes and numb to her own reality, Mae must grapple with the thin line between art and voyeurism and determine how she can remain her own person as the tide of the sixties sweeps over her.
Nothing Special is a whip-smart coming-of-age story about friendship, independence and the construction of art and identity, bringing to life the experience of young women in this iconic and turbulent moment.
Review Every line seems to thrill and break in an indifferent social space, and the result is very moving ― Anne Enright, Irish Times, Books of the Year
[A] blade-sharp coming-of-age debut novel . . . [Flattery] captures the absurdity and the pain, the texture of city streets and the squalid luxury, and brings a deadpan wit to the whole sex and drugs and Pop-art scene ― Spectator
A raucously talented young Irish writer ... Flattery is witty, propulsive and darkly delightful to read ― Economist
Sixties New York is vividly conveyed, but the triumph is in the capture of moody, prickly, ambitious Mae through whose eyes everything is seen . . . [A] witty and unique coming-of-age novel ― Daily Mail
The author of short story collection Show Them A Good Time is one to watch . . . Exploring the rift between their public and private selves, this darkly funny tale draws parallels between 60s New York and today ― Stylist
Flattery has a fine ear for dialogue . . . In fitting her complex, heartfelt, vexing characters into the spaces left where the names of Warhol's typists should have been, Flattery is finally giving those egos, or a version of them, a chance to tell their own story, in their own words ― Guardian
The assuredness of her writing belies the fact that Nothing Special - a tale of identity and purpose set in Andy Warhol's infamous Factory - is her inaugural novel . . . [Nothing Special] does an excellent job of evoking 1960s New York, and balances its ideas of voyeurism and longing expertly ― Harper's Bazaar
This debut novel is that rare thing, an original, off-kilter coming-of-age story, in which life and art collide in unsettling ways ― Mail on Sunday
Nothing Special is as stylishly written as its predecessor Show Them a Good Time. Indeed there are shades of Saul Bellow, in her rendering of New York that 'shrieking cartoon hell' . . . [Flattery] deserves only praise ― Sunday Independent
Nothing Special confirms Flattery as a bracingly original writer; her observations clear-eyed and cool-headed, never pretentious. Readers may be tempted to underline every other sentence in this striking debut from an exciting new voice' ― Irish Independent
Flattery demonstrates here how she can shape on a larger scale and be incredibly inventive in the process . . . [Her] willingness to be ugly and merciless on the page is what makes her work so relentlessly engaging ― Financial Times
A riveting read about fame, myth-making and finding your own identity ― Good Housekeeping About the Author Nicole Flattery is the author of the story collection Show Them a Good Time. She is the winner of the An Post Irish Book Award, the Kate O'Brien Prize, the London Magazine Prize for Debut Fiction, and the White Review Short Story Prize. Her work has appeared in the Stinging Fly, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, and elsewhere. A graduate of the master's program in creative writing at Trinity College, she lives in Dublin, Ireland.
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