A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing

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.

Review

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. (Anne Enright Guardian)

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. (David Collard Times Literary Supplement)

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

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

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. (Gaby Wood Telegraph)

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

Book Description

A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride is an award-winning experimental debut novel, which tells the story of a young woman’s traumatic coming-of-age in rural Ireland, as she struggles with her abusive family and clings to her relationship with her terminally ill brother.