A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing

A Novel

By: Eimear McBride

Narrated by: Eimear McBride

The dazzling, fearless debut novel that the New York Times hails as “a future classic”.

WINNER: The Bailey Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award, the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, Vanity Fair, New York, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Star Tribune, Electric Literature, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal

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.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE AND THE FOLIO PRIZE

Extremely dark but wonderfully experimental

I both love and hate this book in equal measure. It’s incredibly triggering but I have a lot of respect for how unconventionally it’s written and I think that adds a lot to the story, plus made it readable for me where it otherwise wouldn’t be since the almost poetic approach sanded off some of the sharper edges of a very very dark and tragic story

Writing style not my cup of tea

The story could've really gone places. Instead nearly all the book focuses on is the narrators sexual escapism. My main issue with the book though, was the writers peculiar style. It's like tourrettes syndrome in print. Repetitive, swear words thrown in mid sentence for no reason, and non cohesive rambling from the narrator. I really had to power through it.

Tough, disturbing but a future classic?

This award winning debut novel is fascinating but not for the faint of heart. McBride relates the Girls's story of her relationship with her brother, victim of a childhood brain tumor, her fanatically religious, Irish Catholic mother, and her Uncle who rapes and deflowers her at age 13 - all contributing to a warped, distorted sexual identity. Most fascinating is the prose or lack of it. The Girl's stream of consciousness style monologue is as fractured and broken as her psyche and requires the reader's patience throughout to glean the sense of it. But McBride
uses this language of splintered thoughts and feelings most effectively, creating a visceral reading experience. Her style invites comparisons to Joyce, and Faulkner as well as the interior searching of Virginia Woolf. Well worth the effort.

Brilliant. Harrowing.

This is not a traditional narrative. If there's something more intimate than first-person prose, this is it. Emotions need not be bound by subjects and predicates. Eimear McBride has achieved something remarkable here, and that is to impart the very soul of her protagonist within those of us fortunate enough to share in this journey, which is made all the better by her reading. Only the author knows the exact rhythm, the exact tone of these words, which might be frustrating on the page but are music in aural form. McBride has given us a precious gift.

Extraordinary Book

This is an incredible book. Challenging to read but takes on a totally new dimension when the author reads it.