This is a book that I wanted to like, but it fell short and I’m not sure why. Aine moves to London with her boyfriend and they rent a flat. But all’s not well and that’s part of the problem, I think. Is Aine unwell and suffering a mental health crisis? Is her relationship floundering? Is the flat haunted by ghosts or is it just wild imaginings? Is the whole story a 21st century allegorical tale about a twenty something’s aimless search for meaning?

I’m lost because it touches on all these aspects but doesn’t fulfil any of them in a satisfactory way. As an older reader, maybe I’m the wrong target market. I didn’t feel any great empathy for her predicament and I was hoping, I think, for more of a ghostly slant to the story. It is well written and there’s some humour but I struggled to finish it and was left disappointed.

I loved the premise of this book but struggled with the pacing. Lanigan created a good atmosphere of malaise but I felt mental health struggles were drip-teased throughout and then never followed up on which made it difficult to understand whether Lanigan intended this as a mental health story or horror and I found myself distracted by this question throughout.

The long, often largely eventless chapters meant I paced myself by reading them one at a time then taking a break and there was a sense of repetitiveness which made me occasionally hesitant to want to pick this back up. There wasn't enough of a a climax and it just sort of fizzled out into a happy ending with a "or was it all sinister all along" thrown in which didn't pique my curiosity as it simply came too late.

I feel this could have been a brilliant short story or novella but there wasn't enough substance for an entire novel.

A beautifully written atmospheric novel about Áine's search for 'home'. Moving in with her boyfriend because her friend and flatmate has bought a houseboat, the dream quickly turns sour as she is faced with the reality of co-habitation and the horrors of London's rental market. The books blurs reality and anxious imagination really well, the disquiet oozes off the pages. The characters make this novel, each expertly drawn and complex showing the complexity of the rapidly changing life that is your 20s. A stunning read, very engrossing.

Nice idea thinking about modern, young, urban and precarious lives as a kind of ghost story but I found the writing flat and the details mundane. This may well be deliberate given Aine's 'prescription' that she doesn't take but it made reading this a struggle.

I also think this will appeal to twenty somethings as so much about this feels to be tapping into a generational malaise: aimless, drifting lives; a desire for a relationship just because is the next step in some kind of template; loneliness exacerbated by Aine's own decision to work from home full time because she's too exhausted to commute every day; friendships falling by the wayside.

The atmosphere is deadened and claustrophobic, indicative of Aine's interiority.

oh i LOVED this! super atmospheric, creepy, and anxiety-inducing. scarily relatable at points (hello upstairs neighbours from hell 👋🏻) excited to read more work from róisín lanigan!

I’ve had to think long and hard to decide what I want to say about this book. Not because I didn’t like it (I liked it a lot), but because it’s a dense and circuitous story that’s difficult to pin down – something that’s unlikely to be clear from a summary of the plot. In fact, if I sum up I Want to Go Home But I’m Already There, it might sound pretty straightforward. Áine is a twentysomething Irish woman in London who’s just moved in with her boyfriend Elliott. While the move was born out of necessity, they seem to have hit the jackpot with their new flat: it’s affordable, quiet, in a ‘good’ area, and even has a garden. Áine, however, struggles to feel at home there, growing increasingly uneasy: about the persistent mould, the creepy upstairs neighbour, and, more broadly, the discomfort of inhabiting a space that isn’t truly hers.

The book grabbed my attention partly because of its perfect one-line pitch: ‘a ghost story set in the rental crisis’. I commend whoever managed to come up with that, because it’s actually very hard to categorise. If this novel is any kind of ghost story, it’s an existential one.

Put another way: Áine and Elliott finding an affordable flat in a leafy London suburb is such a fantasy that it can only be, underneath that, a horror story. It’s the inherent uncanniness of living in places that don’t belong to you: the destabilising effect of frequent moves, rising prices, poor conditions, all the limitations those things place on the rest of your life. It’s also the story of the disintegration of a relationship in which nothing is really wrong, and yet, everything is. You could even argue it’s a story about depression. The atmosphere is suffocatingly mundane, filled with long, inert stretches of life that feel just slightly off, a quality it shares with books like Janice Galloway's The Trick is to Keep Breathing (with its sense of numbness) and Kiare Ladner's Nightshift (for the London alienation).

Formally, though, I found it closest to a bunch of books I’ve read that were originally published in the 90s or 2000s, like Helen Smith’s Alison Wonderland, Matt Thorne’s Tourist and Cherry, and Scarlett Thomas’s Lily Pascale novels. These are all books that were positioned as being ‘about’ something (usually some sort of mystery) but are really a lot baggier than that. They’re filled with highly detailed writing about quotidian things, an approach that immerses us in the world of the character, so we’re taken along with them whatever happens, whether banal or fantastical. Too readable to be ‘literary’, too character-led to be ‘genre’, too plotless to be ‘commercial’, they don’t fit into any modern marketing category.

This is a class of novel that I didn’t think existed any more; it’s a genuinely pleasant surprise to encounter one in the wild. At the same time, because I Want to Go Home... takes this freewheeling, discursive approach, I’ve found it very difficult to articulate why I liked it. It can be a little too baggy: there are some episodes (the dog??) that could have been cut in their entirety without making any difference to the story overall. Then again, if Áine sometimes feels too passive, too stuck in her own inertia – that’s kind of the point. And if I’ve rambled on too much about all this in my review... well, that very much suits the book.

This one took a while to read, with long chapters that dragged the further I got into the book. I didn't hate it but I also didn't love it. I did enjoy the main story topics, however.

2.5

Oh, I really enjoyed this! It's a strange little book, and hard to really explain, but it's fun and humorous in a very specific way that works for me. The prose is a bit dense at times, but if you don't mind details and descriptions of mundane life, it should work for you. If you're a young person feeling like the world has tossed you around both emotionally and otherwise, this will resonate.

Aine decides to move in with her boyfriend, Elliott, because her best friend and flatmate Laura is buying a houseboat with her own partner. It just makes sense for them to move in together - right? Aine loves Elliott, he’s so different from every boy who has come before, but she’s not sure she loves him in the right way. They find a miraculous London flat within their budget, but quickly discover growing mould, and an oppressive unseen presence weighing on every moment Aine spends there.

This story takes place over the course of a year - the one year tenancy agreement that Aine and Elliott signed. It’s a witty and biting commentary on both the horrific London rental market (help, I’m there too) and trying to date in your 20s and 30s in the city. Aine feels everyone around her moving on with their lives, doing things that she’s not even sure she wants to do, but feels like she needs to be moving towards. There’s an emptiness and unease within her relating to her unfulfilled life, and she projects her anxieties and depression that are the fallout of knowing something is fundamentally wrong.

Frustratingly, Aine is not a very likeable character. I don’t think that matters to the story - so maybe that’s the point. She has a lot of terrible opinions, and you know from the jump that she’s an unreliable narrator, as there are certain things she gives zero details about. Her mystery “Prescription” for one - her mental and physical illnesses that progress throughout the book only lead to more issues, but she only goes to the doctor once, and ignores what they say. Laura and Elliott seem to do pretty much everything for her, and I have no idea how she supposedly stayed employed, given it seemed like she was never even logged into her laptop, let alone doing any work. Elliott, Laura & Cian are much more interesting characters, but we only ever see them through Aine’s very wonky point of view.

The ghost story portion of the plot is not the horror part. The horror is the above, the requirement to live an unfulfilling adult life in a mouldy flat with someone you don’t really love, but you don’t feel like there’s much alternative to. I spent the majority of the book assuming Aine was just going through some kind of psychosis and/or hallucinations, rather than ever humouring the idea that there might be a ‘real’ ghost.

The writing is really great, but the narrative certainly loses its way at times, and I felt myself just growing bored if not despondent as Aine trudged through her awful life. This book is definitely worth a read, and I think it will really find a place with a lot of people, but I think it was a bit much for me. A 3.5 star - glad I read it, but I won’t be reading it again.

When Áine’s friend Laura decides to move out of their shared flat to buy a houseboat with her boyfriend, Áine, too, finds a new place to live, moving in with her own boyfriend, Elliott. They’re lucky, really: despite the nightmarish London rental market, they manage to secure a flat in a neighbourhood filled with organic food shops and fancy coffee places. It should be easy enough to feel at home there—yet Áine is unsettled from the start. The creeping mould around the basement door, the furniture left behind by previous tenants, and the strange upstairs neighbour who seems to be watching her all contribute to a growing sense of unease.

I Want to Go Home But I’m Already There speaks to a generation trapped in the rental crisis, with little hope of ever affording a home of their own. Roisin Lanigan captures the psychological toll of short-term leases, perpetual displacement, and the powerlessness of being at the mercy of anonymous landlords.

Rather than a plot-driven novel, this is an introspective, atmospheric story centred on a small but vividly drawn cast of characters. Lanigan’s writing excels in its haunting depictions of the mundane: Áine works from home, struggles to maintain friendships, and, most of all, simply exists within the flat, observing its eerie atmosphere. The novel brims with chilling imagery—the fruit that rots within hours, the distant wails of a woman she has never seen, the persistent cough that lingers whenever she’s indoors. As the narrative unfolds, the line between reality and imagination blurs, and the flat itself seems to take on a life of its own.

Lanigan also captures Áine’s deepening isolation as her obsession with the flat’s sinister nature grows. With her family back in Ireland and her university friends drifting away, she struggles to hold on to past connections. Elliott, dismissive of her concerns, only widens the emotional distance between them.

I Want to Go Home But I’m Already There is a chilling, witty, and unconventional ghost story—one that explores not just hauntings, but what it truly means to feel at home.

I did enjoy this book, but from the description as a modern day ghost story and being put in the horror genre I was expecting something different. I kept waiting for something to happy and about half way through realised the story was going to carry on in the same vein. That said, I enjoyed the writing and could relate to the story having also endured the rental market in London for a few years. There was certainly a creepiness to it and a lingering sense of dread, but I think it's doing the book a disservice to call it a horror.

2.5*
I was incredibly intrigued by the beginning of the book, so I had quite high expectations, however, about 30% through it started to drag quite a bit. There wasn't much in terms of plot, so it didn't feel like anything was actually happening.

I found the commentary on the rental market interesting and relatable, but the rest of the book was unfortunately not for me. The writing was quite repetitive and didn't capture my attention beyond the very beginning and introduction to the story.

Thanks to NetGalley for the free digital copy of this book in exchange for a review!

3/5 stars

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been too many years since my last confession. These are my sins. I am loved and I don’t think I deserve to be loved. I am a betrayer. I am a bad friend. I am pretending to be someone else. I am tired all the time from the pretence. There are ten commandments and I am steadily making my way through violating all of them. There’s something inside my house and I think it wants to kill me. Does the Church still believe in exorcism? Can you exorcise my house? It’s not really my house anyway. Can you exorcise me?”

An interesting look at a modern day haunted life amidst adolescent anxieties and an increasingly constricting housing crisis. I appreciated a lot of the ideas, but didn’t feel it lived up to its full potential.
We follow young couple Elliot and Áine, having just moved in together into a shared rental flat that, on the surface, looks like the millennial dream. We follow them throughout the duration of their yearlong lease, as the cracks begin to appear in both the walls of their seemingly perfect dwelling, as well as their relationship.

This was one of my most anticipated literary releases of the year. The potential for a haunted-house novel examining millennial existential fears, set during a post-pandemic rental-crisis was endless. I was excited to see where the author would take it. Above all, I wanted the novel to capture that titular homesick feeling of wanting to return to a “feeling of home” regardless of location. A state that might not even exist anymore, or maybe never has. In its best moments, it did that, but there was a lot of (for lack of a better word) “empty space” in between those.

Empty space occupies a lot of the pages of this novel. There’s the emptiness that Áine feels about her life, her job and her daily routines. The increasingly empty silence between her and her boyfriend, and the empty conversations with her friends. The emptiness of a house that refuses to become a home, because it’s so clearly impermanent and “not yours”. It asks the question of our current crisis is a “housing”-one, a “homing-crisis”, or both. I loved these conversations about a situation I have lived, and continue to see many of my generation-fellows still live.
Personally, I’d wished there’d been a little more to fill the empty spaces though. As it stands, I Want to Go Home but I’m Already There has distinctly little plot, resulting in a dragging and often boring reading-experience. Although that thematically matches well, I feel like a bit of contrast with some more dark comedy or even more genuine horror from the “hauntings” would’ve elevated it even more.

Many thanks to Penguin and Fig Tree for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

I was enthralled by this book. A woman moves into a damp, creepy flat with her boyfriend and becomes convinced she’s being cursed or haunted. It’s unclear whether the flat is actually haunted, or it’s a manifestation of everything that’s not quite right in her life (which is pretty much everything). Her relationship with her boyfriend is strained, her best friend (and former housemate) is moving on with her life without her, her job doesn’t seem to notice if she’s there or not, her family bonds seem a bit odd too, her mental health (and physical health in parts) is declining. I found the narrative compelling and oppressive, as the story went on it became more and more so. A claustrophobic and compelling read.

An interesting modern-day haunting.
I was hoping for more haunting, a lot of intense description on the mundane it was more an introspective look into a young woman’s anxiety’s and relationships. A good read but not the ‘ghost story’ I expected.
Thank you to net galley for the ARC.

I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There is an electrifying, genre-blurring meditation on nostalgia, identity, and the unsettling liminality of modern life. With razor-sharp prose and a dreamlike, almost haunted atmosphere, Lanigan captures the strange, in-between spaces (both physical and emotional) where memory and reality collide.

The writing is hypnotic, shifting seamlessly between the deeply personal and the eerily universal. It’s a book that understands the allure of longing, the way homesickness can exist even for places and times that never truly belonged to us. Every page brims with a quiet, aching beauty, making it impossible to put down.

This is the kind of book that lingers, that seeps into your thoughts and makes you reconsider your own sense of place and belonging. A stunning, evocative work.

I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There follows Áine who has just moved into a flat with her boyfriend, Elliot. The new flat is in a great neighbourhood but Áine feels uncomfortable and as if someone is watching her in the flat. Áine stays inside the flat and pretends to work from home but ends up doom scrolling and fixating on the issues with the flat. Her friends are moving on with their lives, her relationship with Elliot isn’t perfect and she cannot ignore how she feels like she is being watched.

This was well done and very clever. Personally I found it to be less of a haunted story and more a metaphor for the issues in Áine’s life. I could feel the atmosphere and melancholic tone to this book. That said, I did find it to be a bit too long and parts of this were a bit uncomfortable mainly Áine and Elliot’s relationship and I can’t say I enjoyed all of this. This beginning was very compelling though.

This is true horror for me. I feel the claustrophobic feeling of the characters when I read. I feel all of the feelings. Talnted author and a must read! Thanks to NetGalley, the publisher and the author for a chance to read this eARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Claustrophobic and nightmarish novel, flawed characters dragged through life. The sense of the dampness that infest the apartment seeps through the pages,

Wasn't mad about the ending, but found myself totally in the world from the get-go. It would be wrong to say I 'enjoyed' this...a very immersive read. Excited to see what Róisín does next.