Awards

• Long-listed for Desmond Elliott Prize 2014.
• Long-listed for Guardian First Book Award 2013.
• Shortlisted for Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2014.
• Shortlisted for Desmond Elliott Prize 2014.
• Shortlisted for Folio Prize 2014.
• Shortlisted for Goldsmiths Prize 2013.
• Winner of Goldsmiths Prize 2013.

Overview

Winner, Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, United Kingdom, 2014 Winner, Goldsmiths Prize, United Kingdom, 2013 Winner, Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, Ireland, 2014 Winner, Desmond Elliott Prize, United Kingdom, 2014 Shortlisted, Folio Prize, 2014 Longlisted, Guardian First Book Award, United Kingdom, 2013 This incredible debut novel tells, with astonishing insight and in brutal detail, the story of a young woman's relationship with her brother, and the long shadow cast by his childhood brain tumour. Not so much a stream of consciousness, as an unconscious railing against a life that makes little sense, and a shocking and intimate insight into the thoughts, feelings and chaotic sexuality of a vulnerable and isolated protagonist. To read A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing is to plunge inside its narrator's head, experiencing her world first-hand. This isn't always comfortable - but it is always a revelation. Touching on everything from family violence to sexuality and the personal struggle to remain intact in times of intense trauma, McBride writes with singular intensity, acute sensitivity and mordant wit. A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is moving, funny - and alarming. It is a book you will never forget.

Full Product Details

9781922182234

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Reviews

'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

'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 'A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing is a familiar Irish tale told in transfigured Irish style, a lyrical prose-poem on horror and human endurance that is - astonishingly - neither horrific nor hard to read.' Monthly

Author Information

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.

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