A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing

“One of the most groundbreaking pieces of literature to come from Ireland, or anywhere, in recent years.”—Vanity Fair

“For all its experiments with form, the events of A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing are easy for readers to follow—McBride’s great skill is in communicating a clear story through a complicated use of language. . . . A remarkable book . . . Her language is artfully deranged to make familiar experiences strange and new but in that derangement there is vitality, even joy. The desolation of the tale is held in a gripping tension with the richness of the telling. . . . McBride is pushing further even than Beckett did into what he called ‘the syntax of weakness.’ Her very words have holes in them.”—The New York Review of Books

“That this deliberately stunted narrative language retains its power past the girl’s childhood and into her adult years is a testament to McBride’s verbal dexterity and tight narrative focus. . . . A heartbreaking but stunning read, a portrait of suffering barely visible under cloudy water.”—Chicago Tribune

“Shattering . . . Be prepared to be blown away by this raw, visceral, brutally intense neomodernist first novel. . . . While McBride’s girl may be a half-formed thing, there’s nothing half-formed about even her most fragmented sentences. . . . McBride’s writing is so alive with internal rhymes, snippets of overheard conversation, prayers and unfiltered emotion, and her narrator so feisty, that readers can’t help but be pulled into the vortex of this devastating, ferociously original debut.”—NPR

“Brilliant . . . bracing, unrelenting, and audacious . . . Yes, this book actually gave me nightmares. And yet I did not want to stop reading it. . . . A literary sensation.”—The Millions

“A future classic . . . A Girl subjects the outer language the world expects of us to the inner syntaxes that are natural to our minds, and in doing so refuses to equate universal experience with universal expression—a false religion that has oppressed most contemporary literature, and most contemporary souls.”—Joshua Cohen, The New York Times Book Review

“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 language plunges us into the center of experiences that are often raw, unpleasant, frightening, but also vital.”—James Wood, The New Yorker

“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

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

“A novel both formally innovative and psychologically unsparing. . . . Ms. McBride’s shattered soliloquys masterfully convey the maelstrom of teenage sexuality. . . . The hurt of adolescence is a familiar subject for a novel, but Ms. McBride’s stylistic daring makes it fresh and raw.” –The Wall Street Journal

“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.”—BBC

“Written in a Joycean stream of consciousness with an Irish lilt, and sentence fragments transmit the pervasive sense of urgency, of thoughts spinning faster than the tongue can speak. . . an unforgettable novel.”—Publishers Weekly, starred 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 Reviews, starred review

“Eimear McBride is that old-fashioned thing, a genius. . . . The adventurous reader will find that they have a real book on their hands, a live one, a book that is not like any other.”—Anne Enright, The Guardian

“A wonderful but harrowing first person stream of consciousness.”—Harper’s Bazaar