A Girl is a Half-formed Thing

Author(s): Eimear McBride

Novel | Read our reviews!

Winner of numerous literary awards including the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and the Goldsmiths Prize, Eimear McBride's debut novel A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing plunges us into the psyche of a girl with breathtaking fury and intimacy. Adapted for the stage by Annie Ryan for The Corn Exchange, Eimear McBride's A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing premiered at the Dublin Theatre Festival 2014.

____________________
THOMAS'S REVIEW:
Very occasionally you come across a book that impresses itself upon you so heavily that the next several books you read seem contrived and inconsequential by comparison. Eimear McBride’s story of a young woman’s relationship with her brother, the on-going impact of his childhood brain tumour, their mother’s hysterical Catholicism and the narrator’s increasingly chaotic and self-annihilating sexuality is tremendously affecting because of the highly original (and note-perfect) way in which the author has broken and remade language to match the thought-patterns of the narrator. Short sentences like grit in the mind, snatches of unassimilable experience, syntax fractured by trauma, the uncertain, desperately repeated and painfully 
abandoned attempts to wring a gram of meaning or even beauty out of compound tragedy, to carry on, both living and telling, despite the impossibility of carrying on, situate the reader right inside the narrator’s head. This book is upsetting, intense, compassionate, revelatory, unflinching, and sometimes excoriatingly funny. It gives access to what you would have thought inaccessible. 


{THOMAS}


Product Information

* Interviews in newspapers such as Age, Sydney Morning Herald, Courier Mail and the NZ Herald * Reviews in newspapers across Australia and New Zealand * Reviews in literary magazines and journals such as Australian Book Review, Monthly and the Listener * Interviews on radio programs such as Radio National's Life Matters and Radio NZ Saturday's with Kim Hill * Widespread online review coverage * Early reading copies available to the trade * Promotions and giveaways with targeted subscriber groups, including book lovers such as the CAE and Good Reading * Banner advertising on bookseller websites * Feature title in Text newsletters and website

Winner of Baileys Prize for Women's Fiction 2014 Winner of The Desmond Elliott Prize for debut novelist 2014 Winner of Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award 2014 Winner of Goldsmiths Prize 2013. Shortlisted for Folio Prize 2014 Guardian First Book Award 2013.

'Unforgettable...Eimear McBride is a writer of remarkable power and originality.' Times Literary Supplement 'Eimear McBride's ferociously intense and stylistically challenging account of a young girl's coming-of-age in rural Ireland is an astonishing literary debut...bracingly alive with sardonic humour and brilliantly realised set-pieces...A remarkable achievement.' Irish Independent 'Beautifully-produced...immensely impressive.' Guardian 'She is definitely a genius...Truth-spilling, uncompromising and brilliant prose...An instant classic.' -- Anne Enright Guardian 'Remarkable, harshly satisfying first novel.' London Review of Books 'The author's use of language is so unique, so instantly inimitable that McBridean deserves to be an adjective...The writing has its forebears. Virginia Woolf springs to mind in its interiority, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett in its expression of fragmented consciousness.' New Humanist

Eimear McBride was born in Liverpool but moved to Ireland when she was three. She grew up in Tubbercurry, Co. Sligo and Castlebar, Co. Mayo, before moving to London aged 17 to study at The Drama Centre. A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing is her first novel.

General Fields

  • : 9781922182234
  • : The Text Publishing Company
  • : Text Publishing
  • : 0.26
  • : October 2013
  • : 198mm X 128mm
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Eimear McBride
  • : Paperback
  • : English
  • : 823/.92
  • : 240
  • : FA