Liam Harrison | Tolka, Web Only, July 2025 Eimear McBride is the author of the novels A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2013), The Lesser Bohemians (2016), Strange Hotel (2020), and, most recently, The City Changes Its Face (2025).  The City Changes Its Face picks up the story two years after McBride’s second novel, The Lesser Bohemians, both set in London in the 1990s. It follows the tempestuous relationship between Eily, a young theatre student, and Stephen, an established actor. The City unspools over the course of a single, turbulent evening, while the narrative is punctuated by flashbacks to recent events. Significant interruptions from the past include a visit from Stephen’s daughter Grace (who is not much younger than Eily), and a dramatic shift as the novel’s style switches to a screenplay of sorts – Eily and Grace watch an autobiographical film Stephen has made about his life, that touches...

Isobel Harbison | Tolka Issue Five, November 2023 The first night home from the hospital I lay in bed. My body had spent a week wrestling with labour until, eventually, the baby was taken out with a knife. He slept beside me now, breathing fast. It was a warm late-summer Sunday in London and the bedroom window was open. Our rented apartment ran adjacent to the railway bridge and opposite another beige tower block, the hard U-shape trapping the voices of the wine-soaked clients from the restaurant below and sending them rebounding upwards. I listened to the misshapen chorus. Having a small child, I thought, knowing virtually nothing about the endeavour, is like having the front door of your home removed so that nobody can leave unless some other adult is in there. And with this thought came fear. I might lose night. * Crepuscular animals forage and fuck at...

1. It is a ‘sentimental mishmash . . . muddily photographed in flat television style.’ Peter Nicholls, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction 2. It ‘invites you to have some wonderful dumb, callow fun.’ Pauline Kael 3. It was made for €12 million – even at the time a relatively small budget – and released on 4 June 1982, when I was not quite a year old. 4. I don’t remember the first time I saw it, though I can guess that it was probably around 1991, when I was ten. I must have watched it at least half a dozen times a year since then. I am now forty, which means that I have seen it some 180 times. If we factor in the period in the middle of my adolescence when I watched this film once a week – every Wednesday afternoon, when school finished early – we can...

Eva O’Connor | Tolka, Issue One, May 2021 7.35 a.m. Running, not walking. By necessity, not choice. My bones still infused with sleep, wound and bound in layers of ancient T-shirts. Leggings exhausted, puckered at the knees. Puffa jacket oozing feathers as I pant, spliced open that time I drunkenly slid down a pebble-dash wall outside some nightclub. Back when there were nightclubs. The shins on me are screaming with the splints. R. is dressed for work. Black on black on black. Everything declares neat. Mary Poppins boots, double-knotted with precision, at her slender ankles (she has always had ankles like baby trees). In her proximity I am blurry and vague. She blinks at me, X-raying my soul, and her face scrunches into a smile. Suddenly R. is six again, grinning up from a Coco Pops bowl, peering down from a gnarled apple tree, side-eying me from behind a pair...