A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing: A Novel

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