Girl Is a Half Formed Thing

It's no surprise that this striking, emotionally charged novel won countless awards last year. Using fractured language betraying the narrator's mental state, McBride deftly relates the story of a girl growing up in a hostile home where everyone must grapple with a pervading cancer, both literally and metaphorically. Recommended By Renee P., Powells.com

The dazzling, fearless debut novel that 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. 

“A jolting, unforgettable voice....A novel both formally innovative and psychologically unsparing." The New York Times

“It is, in all respects, a heresy — which is to say, Lord above, it’s a Future Classic” New York Times, Sunday Book Review

“A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing is indeed conventional in places, but in most respects the novel is blazingly daring....[McBride’s] prose is a visceral throb, and the sentences run meanings together to produce a kind of compression in which words, freed from the tedious march of sequence, seem to want to merge with one another, as paint and musical notes can. The results are thrilling, and also thrillingly efficient.” The New Yorker

“Be prepared to be blown away by this raw, visceral, brutally intense neomodernist first novel....Readers can’t help but be pulled into the vortex of this devastating, ferociously original debut.” NPR

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. She currently lives in Norwich with her family and is at work on her second novel.