Responses to Eimear McBride’s work – whether rapturous or puzzled – often begin by considering her formal innovations. The story of her success is a heartening one. An odd, seemingly unsellable book, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, for which McBride took nine years to find a publisher, jolted to remarkable literary heights in 2013 thanks to several prizes and sparkling reviews. Her daring prose style was part of what made her success so cheering: evidence that the reading public is still eager for a novel that not only comforts or entertains but challenges and uproots expectations. Hers is prose in which sentences judder and disintegrate and run over each other.

McBride’s extraordinary and exhilarating fourth novel, The City Changes Its Face, is a sequel of sorts to her 2016 work The Lesser Bohemians, in which 18-year-old Eily moves from Ireland to London to study acting with a wish to shed her virginity, and meets Stephen, a promiscuous actor 20 years her senior who tells her he has never been in love. They quickly begin an affair whose potency shocks and bewilders them both. The City Changes Its Face begins two years into the relationship. Two narratives alternate, the here and now: 1996 in London, in which Eily struggles to reconcile herself with several undefined incidents between herself and Stephen; and their first winter together in the city in 1995. The two time-frames eventually catch up with each other, revealing the events that have cast a shadow over their relationship in the intervening period. A third, crucial figure is Stephen’s 18-year-old daughter Grace, whose presence is not just intrusive for Eily and the home she wishes to preserve for her and Stephen’s infatuation, but who conjures with unwelcome viscerality parts of Stephen’s past, and of himself, which he struggles to tolerate.

What is perhaps most surprising about The City Changes Its Face is how little its unconventional style intrudes on its narrative. Often, such unorthodox registers continually announce themselves, the reader always conscious of their alien presence. Here, though, McBride’s genius is to create a work whose innovation allows the reader to experience the sensation of feeling and thinking, instead of observing thoughts and feelings described. The sentences do not show themselves off, are not self-conscious of their strangeness. After being rebuffed by Stephen for sex, Eily wishes him goodnight but then we hear her actual inner workings, fizzing away in silent resentment: “Night night bitch battle body fold and ache. Bloody spurned to the wall by your blanched shoulder blade. Bloody looking at the state of the wallpaper on it. Bloody f**k. Bloody what anyway.”

It isn’t necessary to have read The Lesser Bohemians to pick up The City Changes Its Face, but those who have will be familiar with some of Stephen’s bleak backstory, revealed in the first book through a long reported monologue – a story that includes addiction rendered with unsparing physical abjection, and maternal sexual abuse. In this book, Stephen’s demons are roused by the resemblance he thinks he can see between his daughter and his mother. The suggestion that any personal qualities can be traced down through the family line is, understandably, a difficult reality for him to bear. The problem of his lover, Eily, being only marginally older than his daughter presents its own discomfort. There is a brilliant, long scene where the two young women go to the pub without him and get blind drunk. Eily is a little better able to handle herself, while Grace must be helped to vomit and then undressed and put to bed.

Then carried her puppy limbs down the hall. Minding her head.
Laying her down. Took her shoes off as she variously groaned versions of
That was fun.

This shared transgression, speaking to their shared, all-too-proximate girlhood, inflames the latent anxiety of the situation. Stephen has already, to Eily’s rage, found it difficult to have sex while his daughter is in the same house. Now, she collects all her frustrated sourness about the situation – about Grace’s presence, about Stephen’s incapabilities – and threatens to say something unforgivable.

Are you finding it hard to tell us apart?
I don’t know what you’re getting at but I’d be very careful
now, if I were you.

Though Eily steps right to the line, she doesn’t, in the end, accuse him of what she is skirting around: an incestuous impulse of his own. I found myself holding my breath, waiting to see how far she would go.

In the last third of the book, an autobiographical film Stephen has made exploring his history is shown for the first time to both Eily, who knows what has happened to him, and to Grace, who only partially does. Like another great Irish novelist of the moment, Caoilinn Hughes, who wrote The Alternatives, McBride makes marvellous use of the script as a device for viewing her characters in new ways. It’s here that we are granted fuller access to the depth of what Stephen endured and what he has gone through to survive it, and here we see just how dangerous Eily’s temptation to accuse him was. Following a film scene depicting a rape, Stephen’s mother haunts him and tells him he too is bound to carry on the evil: “On and on and on. My father to me and me to you and you to…”

It is a wise decision to reveal the details through this mediated lens, rather than through Eily’s thoughts or directly from Stephen. “Viewing”, rather than reading, keeps us slightly removed, and prevents the possibility of melodrama that such a litany of misery otherwise risks. This darkness is also offset by the other great strength of the novel, which is McBride’s ecstatic rendering of sex between the two obsessive lovers.

Will you warm me up now?
I’m not convinced     yet.
   Now?
          Well
Now?
  Do that again.
      So        now?
Yes    more            whatever the f**k you want!

And I was gone so far, so quick, I’d not a single comeback left. Only flitters of syllables trailing to laughs. Mouths fixing shifts to further acts of Here we go. Always and again.

There is nobody alive writing sex like this. McBride is able to capture the often indistinguishable line between agony and pleasure, the way one can be known totally and known not at all from one moment to the next. I read this book in the flayed aftermath of a break-up, still in that state where it seems unlikely that I’ll ever touch anyone again. The execution of these scenes was so powerful that it felt as if they were recalling painful memories of my own, instead of those belonging to fictional characters. What a glorious achievement, to make life instead of merely describing it.