Published in 2013
203 pages
Award-winning author Eimear McBride was born in 1976 and grew up in Ireland. At twenty-seven she wrote A Girl is a Half-formed Thing and spent just under a decade trying to have it published. The novel went on to win the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Desmond Elliot Prize, the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, the Goldsmiths Prize, and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, among others. She currently lives in Norwich with her family. Her second novel is The Lesser Bohemians.
What is this book about?
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.
