“This is a simply brilliant book… emotionally raw and at the same time technically astounding. McBride's 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. I can't recommend it highly enough.” Elizabeth McCracken

Eimear McBride's debut tells, with astonishing insight and in brutal detail, the story of a young woman's relationship with her brother, and the long shadow cast by his childhood brain tumour. Not so much a stream of consciousness, as an unconscious railing against a life that makes little sense, and 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 first-hand. This isn't always comfortable – but it is always a revelation.

Touching on everything from family violence to sexuality and the personal struggle to remain intact in times of intense trauma, McBride writes with singular intensity, acute sensitivity and mordant wit. A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is moving, funny and alarming. It is a book you will never forget.

Eimear McBride

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