The Floor Between Us

A sharp, tender debut novel set in Dublin — The Floor Between Us is the story of a young man who moves to a new city and falls quietly, helplessly in orbit around the person living one floor below him.

Ciarán has left Donegal behind for a studio apartment on Leeson Park, a copywriting job in a Spencer Dock agency, and a series of deeply disappointing dates. He expects Dublin to remake him. He doesn't expect Ronan — the man downstairs who cooks too much pasta, coaches under-sixteens, and listens to Ciarán with a quality of attention he has never received anywhere else.

Through shared Saturdays at a local café, evenings on the front step, and the particular intimacy of knowing someone's life through floorboards and thin walls, something grows that Ciarán can't name and keeps choosing not to examine. The Floor Between Us is a novel about the weight of wanting something you won't quite let yourself want — and about what it costs to keep living one floor away from it.

Funny, quietly devastating, and written with the kind of precision that makes you read sentences twice.