A girl is a half-formed thing - Eimear McBride

WINNER OF THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION

WINNER OF THE DESMOND ELLIOTT PRIZE

KERRY GROUP IRISH NOVEL OF THE YEAR AWARD

WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE

Eimear McBride's award-winning debut novel tells the story of a young woman's relationship with her brother, and the long shadow cast by his childhood brain tumour. It is 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 at first hand. This isn't always comfortable - but it is always a revelation.

Eimear McBride grew up in the west of Ireland and trained at Drama Centre London. Her first novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing took nine years to find a publisher and subsequently received a number of awards, including the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, and the Goldsmiths Prize. Her second novel The Lesser Bohemians won the 2017 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. In 2017 she was awarded the inaugural Creative Fellowship of the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading. In a 2018 Times Literary Supplement poll of 200 critics, academics, and fiction writers, McBride was named one of the ten best British and Irish novelists writing today. Strange Hotel is McBride's third novel.

A virtuosic debut: subversive, passionate, and darkly alchemical. Read it and be changed.
Eleanor Catton

Eimear McBride is that old fashioned thing, a genius, in that she writes truth-spilling, uncompromising and brilliant prose.
Guardian - Anne Enright

Ten pages in and all the bells start ringing. It explodes into your chest.
Caitlin Moran

A life told from deep down inside, beautiful, harrowing, and ultimately rewarding the way only a brilliant work of literature can be.
Michael Chabon

An instant classic account of Irish girlhood that has catapulted McBride into the front rank of modern fiction.
Observer

Eimear McBride is a writer of remarkable power and originality.
Times Literary Supplement - David Collard

A remarkable, harshly satisfying first novel.
London Review of Books - Adam Mars-Jones

It is... a narrative to read aloud as the images shatter and explode.
Irish Times - Eileen Battersby

A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing pushes the boundaries of the novel form... The broken sentences are the narrator's experience of a brutal world she is attempting to negotiate in staggers and fragments... each beautiful phrase McBride writes goes straight to the gut.
Telegraph - Gaby Wood

This singular experiment of a novel, is turning into this year's sleeper hit.
Metro

Addressed to her brother, the entire narrative is constructed in half-strung sentences, devoid of commas or dialogue demarcations but abounding in full-stops. This fragmented syntax is never self-conscious; rather it powerfully heightens the narrator's permanently fraught emotions and coheres into an immensely arresting novel. McBride is fully deserving of all her accolades; the question now is what she can produce next.
Sunday Times - Pick of the paperbacks

Lyrical and hard-hitting ... a beautiful and sublime novel despite the tough subject matter.
Irish Times - Kate Mosse

It is, in a single word, breathtaking.
Nicola Barker

A novel that redefines the novel - that not only takes us on an emotionally dense rollercoaster ride through the perils of intimacy and family life, but delivers the whole extraordinary story in a syntax that is flat out new and terrifyingly and wondrously imaginative.
Herald Scotland - Kirsty Gunn

An unputdownable book.
Daily Express

A brutal and brilliant debut ... This book will arouse powerful emotions in anyone who accords it the respect of reading with attention.
Sunday Times Ireland - John P O'Sullivan

McBride weaves something dazzling... She set out to pick up the experimental modernist baton from James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, and she has done just that.
Observer - Paperback of the week

Eimear McBride's stunning debut pushes the boundaries of the novel form.
Evening Standard

You only need to read the first paragraph of McBride's debut novel to know you are reading something special. She builds up images impressionistically over paragraphs and pages, and her writing has such glorious cadence that it should be read aloud.
The Times - Fiona Wilson

There's an immediacy, an emotional directness as the narrator rails against a frustrating, unfeeling world. Brave, bold, brilliant.
Daily Mail

Soul-wrenchingly sad.
Financial Times

A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing is wild, brave, moving and darkly cryptic.
Chris Cleave

She's firmly in the Irish modernist tradition of Beckett and Joyce, with a nod to Edna O'Brien's Country Girls, but what's so fresh and impressive are the female perspective and emotional charge she brings to a style some might have considered historical. This is a novel so emotionally overwhelming that it can be hard to finish a sentence, but also one in which each line repays thought and second reading. It almost didn't make it into print at all, but it will stay with every reader.
Guardian - Justine Jordan

A triumph of technique very much in the modernist tradition.
Telegraph

This is the work of a writer with the courage to reinvent the sentence as she pleases, and the virtuosity required to pull it off.
Literary Review - Simon Hammond