 | |
| Author | Eimear McBride |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Oleksandr Kovalchuk |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel, stream of consciousness, Bildungsroman |
| Set in | rural Ireland, 1980s/90s [1] |
| Published |
|
| Media type | |
| Pages | 227 |
| Awards | |
| ISBN | 1566893682 |
| OCLC | 839315421 |
| 823.92 | |
| LC Class | PR6113 .C337 |
A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing is the debut novel of Eimear McBride published in 2013.
This stream of consciousness novel explores an Irish girl's relationship with her disabled brother, religious mother, and her own troubled sexuality.
Joshua Cohen described how McBride's experimental style "forgoes quotation marks and elides verbiage for sense, sound and sheer appearance on the page. For emphasis it occasionally wreaks havoc on capItals and reverses letter order." [2]
McBride began writing her debut novel whilst working in a series of office temp jobs. It took nine years to find a publisher and was rejected by numerous companies. The book was eventually first published in 2013, with an initial print run of 1000 copies, by Galley Beggar Press of Norwich, England. [3] Mr Layte, of Galley Beggar Press recalled that the unusual writing-style led him to take up the novel where others had overlooked it:
I thought this was one of the most important books I had ever read. It had the same effect on me as when I first read Samuel Beckett. It was a game-changer as far as what could be done. [4]
In 2014, rights for a trade paperback were sold to publishers Faber and Faber. [5]
In a New York Times review, Joshua Cohen described the book as being "in all respects, a heresy — which is to say, Lord above, it’s a future classic." [2] Reviewing the novel for The Guardian , Anne Enright wrote that it "is hard to read for the best reasons: everything about it is intense and difficult and hard-won." [6]
A New Yorker review by James Wood recounted the novel as "blazingly daring. . . . Eimear McBride 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.” [7]
Kirkus Reviews states that the novel is "exhilarating fiction from a voice to watch." [8]
Adam Mars-Jones in his review for the London Review of Books described the work of Eimear McBride as "if every book was as intense as this, reading literature would be even more of a minority pursuit than it is already. A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing makes that rapturous lament By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept look like Hotel du Lac. But then you wouldn’t want to go to Not I every night of the week." [9]
Annie Galvin for Los Angeles Review of Books stated that "to read the opening paragraph of Eimear McBride’s novel is to be radically disoriented. Sentence fragments pile up, and the familiar skeleton of the English sentence gets fractured, splintered into microscopic units (“You’ll soon.” “Bile for.”) that truncate without pointing in any obvious direction. The novel is many things: an elegy, a fever dream, a document of abuse, a distorted transposition of one consciousness into language. It is not clear; it is not easy. It takes effort to decode." [10]
NPR book reviewer Heller McAlpin advice to the readers is to "be prepared to be blown away by this raw, visceral, brutally intense neomodernist first novel. There's nothing easy about Eimear McBride's novel, from its fractured language to its shattering story of the young unnamed narrator's attempt to drown mental anguish with physical pain." [11]
The novel won several awards including the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, [12] the Goldsmiths Prize, [3] the Desmond Elliott Prize, [13] the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, [14] and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. [15]
The Guardian Book Club featured the novel in 2016, and the BBC Radio 4 Book Club featured the novel in early 2018. [16] [17]
In 2014, the novel was adapted for the stage by Annie Ryan. Initially appearing at the Corn Exchange, Dublin, the production later appeared at the Young Vic in London, the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, and the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York. [18] [19] [20]
The Times Literary Supplement critic Davic Collard described the experience in his review as "When I saw the show again the following night it was, if anything, even more powerful. Like the novel, it has a momentous presence. Unlike the novel, the play is a collective experience." [21]
The audiobook of the novel, read by the author, was released in 2014. [22]
David John Taylor is a British critic, novelist and biographer. After attending school in Norwich, he read Modern History at St John's College, Oxford, and has received the 2003 Whitbread Biography Award for his biography of George Orwell. His novel Derby Day was longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize. He was previously a member of the Norwich Writers' Circle.
Joseph O'Neill is an Irish novelist and non-fiction writer. O'Neill's novel Netherland was awarded the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award.
The Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize is a British literary prize established in 1963 in tribute to Geoffrey Faber, founder and first Chairman of the publisher Faber & Faber. It recognises a single volume of poetry or fiction by a United Kingdom, Irish or Commonwealth author under 40 years of age on the date of publication, and is in alternating years awarded to poetry and fiction.
Lavinia Elaine Greenlaw is an English poet, novelist and non-fiction writer. She won the Prix du Premier Roman with her first novel and her poetry has been shortlisted for awards that include the T. S. Eliot Prize, Forward Prize and Whitbread Poetry Prize. Her 2014 Costa Poetry Award was for A Double Sorrow: A Version of Troilus and Criseyde. Greenlaw currently holds the post of Professor of Creative Writing (Poetry) at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Charles Boyle is a British poet and novelist. He has published a novella, 24 for 3, under the pseudonym "Jennie Walker", which won the 2008 McKitterick Prize. He also uses the pseudonym "Jack Robinson".
Lucy Caldwell is a Northern Irish playwright and novelist. She was the winner of the 2021 BBC National Short Story Award.
Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo, is a British author and academic. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other, won the Booker Prize in 2019, making her the first black woman and the first black British person to win the Booker.
Sarah Ladipo Manyika is a British-Nigerian writer of novels, short stories and essays and an active member of the literary community, particularly supporting and amplifying young writers and female voices. She is author of two well received novels, In Dependence (2009) and Like A Mule Bringing Ice Cream To The Sun (2016), and has had work published in publications including Granta, Transition, Guernica, and OZY, and previously served as founding Books Editor of OZY. Manyika's work also features in the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa.
The Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award is an annual award for Irish authors of fiction, established in 1995. It was previously known as the Kerry Ingredients Book of the Year Award (1995–2000) and the Kerry Ingredients Irish Fiction Award (2001–2002).
The Women's Prize for Fiction is one of the United Kingdom's most prestigious literary prizes. It is awarded annually to a female author of any nationality for the best original full-length novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom in the preceding year.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 2013.
The Goldsmiths Prize is a British literary award, founded in 2013 by Goldsmiths, University of London, in association with the New Statesman. It is awarded annually to a piece of fiction that "breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form." It is limited to citizens and residents of the United Kingdom and Ireland, and to novels published by presses based in the United Kingdom or Ireland. The winner receives £10,000. Tim Parnell of the Goldsmiths English department conceived and runs the prize, inspired by his research into Laurence Sterne and other eighteenth-century writers, like Denis Diderot, who experimented with the novel form. The prize "casts its net wider than most other prizes" and intends to celebrate "creative daring," but resists the phrase "experimental fiction," because it implies "an eccentric deviation from the novel’s natural concerns, structures and idioms." To date, Rachel Cusk is the author best represented on the prize's shortlists, having been shortlisted for each book of her Outline trilogy.
Eimear McBride is an Irish novelist whose debut novel, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, won the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize in 2013 and the 2014 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 2014.
The Wake is a 2014 debut novel by British author Paul Kingsnorth. Written in an "imaginary language", a kind of hybrid between Old English and Modern English, it tells of "Buccmaster of Holland", an Anglo-Saxon freeman forced to come to terms with the effects of the Norman Invasion of 1066, during which his wife and sons were killed. He begins a guerrilla war against the Norman invaders in the Lincolnshire Fens.
The Lesser Bohemians is the second novel by Eimear McBride. It was published on 1 September 2016 and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2017.
Katherine Faw, formerly Katherine Faw Morris, is an American writer. Young God, her debut novel, was long-listed for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize and named a best book of the year by The Times Literary Supplement, The Houston Chronicle, and BuzzFeed.
Gaby Wood, Hon. FRSL, is an English journalist, author and literary critic who has written for publications including The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, London Review of Books, Granta, and Vogue. She is the literary director of the Booker Prize Foundation, appointed in succession to Ion Trewin and having taken over the post at the conclusion of the prize for 2015.
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