A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride

Just in case the prospect of reading such a book does not inspire immediate enthusiasm, it is worth noting that A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing is not actually very difficult to get through. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say. The novel opens (already famously): “For you. She reports her experiences in a fragmented prose style brashly defiant of practically all grammatical and syntactical conventions. The novel’s nameless narrator describes a life emotionally terrorized by two separate traumatic ordeals: her older brother’s struggle with a brain tumor, which first develops when he is two years old, goes into remission, and then returns when he is in his early twenties and her own sexual molestation at the hands of her uncle-in-law at age thirteen. This success is all the more surprising given the challenges Eimear McBride’s work presents to its readers. It has received near-unanimous praise from British reviewers, turning its author into something of a literary celebrity. It comes with a formidable backstory: after nine years of rejections, it was published by a tiny and new publishing house in England, and in the space of just a few months, started winning prize after prize.

The Irish novelist Eimear McBride’s debut A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing is now being released in the US.

A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride