A GIRL IS A HALF-FORMED THING
Driven to despair by the intimate traumas of family, a nameless woman uses her sexuality as a weapon and shield. Eimear McBride’s acclaimed debut tells the story of a young woman’s relationship with her brother, and the long shadow cast by his childhood brain tumor, touching on everything from family violence to sexuality and the personal struggle to remain intact in times of intense trauma.
Read our interview with the author on the Reading Group Choices blog!
Driven to despair by the intimate traumas of family, a nameless woman uses her sexuality as a weapon and shield. Eimear McBride’s acclaimed debut tells the story of a young woman’s relationship with her brother, and the long shadow cast by his childhood brain tumor, touching on everything from family violence to sexuality and the personal struggle to remain intact in times of intense trauma.
Read our interview with the author on the Reading Group Choices blog!
- Coffee House Press
- Hardcover
- September 2014
- 227 Pages
- 9781566893688
Buy the Book
$24.00
About Eimear McBride
Eimear McBride was born in 1976 and grew up in the west of Ireland. At twenty-seven she wrote A Girl is a Half-formed Thing and spent the next nine years trying to have it published. In 2013 it was the recipient of the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize. She currently lives in the UK with her husband and daughter.
Praise
Winner of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction
Winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize
Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize
Winner of the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award
“A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is simply a brilliant book—entirely emotionally raw and at the same time technically astounding. Her prose is as haunting and moving as music, and the love story at the heart of the novel—between a sister and brother—as true and wrenching as any in literature. This is a book about everything: family, faith, sex, home, transcendence, violence, and love. I can’t recommend it highly enough.” —Elizabeth McCracken
“It was a really astonishing book. We felt that from the first time we read it – it stood out from the crowd. . . It’s incredibly original. It has a raw energy we all responded to. It has real lyrical qualities even though the subject matter can sometimes be so shocking.” —BBC
“A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing is indeed conventional in places, but in most respects the novel is blazingly daring. . . [McBride’s] prose is a visceral throb, and the sentences run meanings together to produce a kind of compression in which words, freed from the tedious march of sequence, seem to want to merge with one another, as paint and musical notes can. The results are thrilling, and also thrillingly efficient.”—The New Yorker, “Useless Prayers”
“It is, in all respects, a heresy–which is to say, Lord above, it’s a Future Classic.”—New York Times, Sunday Book Review
“McBride calls to mind both Joyce and Stein in her syntax and mechanics, but she brings her own emotional range to the table, as well. . . open-minded readers (specifically those not put off by the unusual language structure) will be surprised, moved and awed by this original novel. . . This is exhilarating fiction from a voice to watch.”—Kirkus, starred review
Video
Interviews
Read our interview with Eimear McBride on the Reading Group Choices blog!