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Coming of age in Warhol’s surreal world

The Factory, Andy Warhol’s studio in New York, was a home and inspiration to an eye-popping cadre of artists, musicians, freaks and misfits. It produced some extraordinary, revolutionary output (The Velvet Underground, Warhol’s own challenging pop art) and some that has not proved so memorable (almost everything else). Oh, to have attended a single one of its many libertine evenings.

In Nothing Special, debut Irish novelist Nicole Flattery takes us there, after a fashion. It is 1966 and Mae is a 17-year-old who, escaping a turbulent home life, finds herself working in the famous studio, transcribing tapes of Warhol’s thoughts and interviews with hangers-on and protégés for a novel the great man is planning. She is drawn into the surreal world around her, attending louche parties and screenings of avant-garde, mildly pornographic movies, and becoming increasingly obsessed with the bizarre content unspooling for hours every day on the tapes.

A novel like this will always carry a risk. The

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