The dazzling, fearless debut novel that won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and the book the New York Times hails as “a future classic”. In scathing, furious, unforgettable prose, Eimear McBride tells the story of a young girl’s devastating adolescence as she and her brother, who suffers from a brain tumor, struggle for a semblance of normalcy in the shadow of sexual abuse, denial, and chaos at home. Plunging readers inside the psyche of a girl isolated by her own dangerously confusing sexuality, pervading guilt, and unrelenting trauma, McBride’s writing carries echoes of Joyce, O’Brien, and Woolf. A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is a revelatory work of fiction, a novel that instantly takes its place in the canon.
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“The author’s intense, high-pressure performance of this ambitious book is its best possible version because the text is all voice, expressing half-formed thoughts and half-understood impulses in half-formed sentences, and it’s the confusion, anger, yearning, or grief behind the broken language that tells the story…Rich, original, and haunting, the performance wrenching. You won’t forget it. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
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