I Want To Go Home But I'm Already There

Renting is a nightmare…
A novel about the horrors of renting, presenting a wonderfully clear-eyed portrait of loneliness, loss , and what it means to feel at home.

Renting is a nightmare.

ine 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, ine 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 landlord- 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 presence makes peaceful coexistence very difficult indeed.

The longer ine 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 ine fixates on the cracks in the ceiling, it becomes harder to ignore the cracks in her relationship with Elliott…

Author Biography

R isin Lanigan is an editor and writer based in London and Belfast. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Financial Times, The Guardian and The Fence, amongst other publications. She was longlisted for the Curtis Brown First Novel Prize in 2019, and won the Blue Pencil Agency First Novel Award in 2020. I Want to Go Home But I’m Already There is her first novel.