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Sara Baume was born in Lancashire and grew up in Co. Cork. She studied fine art and creative writing and her short fiction has been published in journals such as The Stinging Fly magazine and the Dublin Review. She won the 2014 Davy Byrnes Short Story Award and the 2015 Hennessy New Irish Writing Award. She now lives in Cork with her two dogs.
March 2017 Book of the Month. Frankie studies art and then works in a gallery in Dublin. The owner only issues part-time contracts for graduating students so after a year she is out of work. Depression and the cusp of mental breakdown follow. She’s twenty-five. She goes home and then persuades her mother that she can care-sit her deceased grandmother’s bungalow while it is on the market. It is here, through the death of a robin, that she decides to commence on an art project photographing dead wild animals, predominantly roadkill. We get the badly produced black and white, grainy photos in the text plus a whole lot of conceptual art references which, in the author’s notes, we are encouraged to look up for we have been given the character’s memory of that part of her studies in “I test myself” sections. Doom and gloom set in. She loses weight and reflects on her childhood and nature, these are the highlights of the book. Her mother is a saint. Unlike the author’s sparsely written first novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither, which developed slowly and was immensely poignant and uplifting, this one is long and dense as Frankie tries to cope with a world that is wrong and a sadness that is crushing her. The result is an extraordinary meditation on art, loneliness and life. I believe it is semi-autobiographical. ~ Sarah Broadhurst
Winner of the 2016 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize 2016. Slow starting first-person monologue that builds into a hypnotic tale which becomes utterly compulsive. It is a novel of companionship, loss and fear. Our narrator, a frightened, dysfunctional, 57-year old man, talks to an equally dysfunctional rescue dog who has a tendency to viciously attack other dogs. Half way through the book our frightened narrator, who has always hid in his home, becomes too frightened to even stay there and the two set off round Ireland’s tiny villages, sleeping in his clapped out old car in gateways and such. Lots of detail, lots of nature observations and lots of early memories make this an interestingly different and poignant read. Stay with it, it will grab you. ~ Sarah Broadhurst Costa Judges' comment: “A tough but tender, brilliant read full of fresh wonder. One to cherish.” One of our Books of the Year 2015. November 2015 Debut of the Month. Shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award 2015. Click here to read an article by Sara Baume on how she came to write this book.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2017 `When I finished Sara Baume's new novel I immediately felt sad that I could not send it in the post to the late John Berger. He, too, would have loved it and found great joy in its honesty, its agility, its beauty, its invention. Baume is a writer of outstanding grace and style. She writes beyond the time we live in.' Colum McCann Struggling to cope with urban life - and with life in general - Frankie, a twenty-something artist, retreats to the rural bungalow on `turbine hill' that has been vacant since her grandmother's death three years earlier. It is in this space, surrounded by nature, that she hopes to regain her footing in art and life. She spends her days pretending to read, half-listening to the radio, failing to muster the energy needed to leave the safety of her haven. Her family come and go, until they don't and she is left alone to contemplate the path that led her here, and the smell of the carpet that started it all. Finding little comfort in human interaction, Frankie turns her camera lens on the natural world and its reassuring cycle of life and death. What emerges is a profound meditation on the interconnectedness of wilderness, art and individual experience, and a powerful exploration of human frailty.
March 2017 Book of the Month. Frankie studies art and then works in a gallery in Dublin. The owner only issues part-time contracts for graduating students so after a year she is out of work. Depression and the cusp of mental breakdown follow. She’s twenty-five. She goes home and then persuades her mother that she can care-sit her deceased grandmother’s bungalow while it is on the market. It is here, through the death of a robin, that she decides to commence on an art project photographing dead wild animals, predominantly roadkill. We get the badly produced black and white, grainy photos in the text plus a whole lot of conceptual art references which, in the author’s notes, we are encouraged to look up for we have been given the character’s memory of that part of her studies in “I test myself” sections. Doom and gloom set in. She loses weight and reflects on her childhood and nature, these are the highlights of the book. Her mother is a saint. Unlike the author’s sparsely written first novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither, which developed slowly and was immensely poignant and uplifting, this one is long and dense as Frankie tries to cope with a world that is wrong and a sadness that is crushing her. The result is an extraordinary meditation on art, loneliness and life. I believe it is semi-autobiographical. ~ Sarah Broadhurst
Ein einsamer Mann Mitte funfzig kommt ins Tierheim. Ray braucht einen Hund, wegen der Ratten in seinem Haus, und er sucht sich den traurigsten Koter von allen aus: Im Kampf mit einem Dachs hat Einauge den Kurzeren gezogen, daher sein Name. Er ist sehr schreckhaft, immer hungrig, und wenn andere Hunde in der Nahe sind, wird er aggressiv. Ray, der das von seinem Vater ererbte schabige Haus an der See bisher kaum verlassen hat, findet in dem armen Kerl einen Gefahrten und ein Spiegelbild. Fruhmorgens unternehmen die beiden lange Strandspaziergange - bis eines Tages eine Frau mit Hund ihren Weg kreuzt. Einauge fallt den Rivalen an, und das Unheil nimmt seinen Lauf. Bald darauf steht eine Polizistin vor der Tur. Ray wimmelt sie ab und flieht mit Einauge in seinem klapprigen Auto. So fahren die beiden, Menschen meidend, die irische Atlantikkuste hinab, wahrend es drauen immer kalter und das Geld immer weniger wird ... Eine traurige, eine herzzerreiende Geschichte, die Sara Baume in eine so klare wie schne Sprache gehllt hat. Ray und sein Hund bewegen sich durch ein wenig idyllisches Irland, Raffinerien, Parkpltze, Dreck - die Kunst der Autorin und ihre berragende Beobachtungsgabe machen aus dieser Flucht eine Reise voll dunkel strahlendem Glanz.
Winner of the 2016 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize 2016. Slow starting first-person monologue that builds into a hypnotic tale which becomes utterly compulsive. It is a novel of companionship, loss and fear. Our narrator, a frightened, dysfunctional, 57-year old man, talks to an equally dysfunctional rescue dog who has a tendency to viciously attack other dogs. Half way through the book our frightened narrator, who has always hid in his home, becomes too frightened to even stay there and the two set off round Ireland’s tiny villages, sleeping in his clapped out old car in gateways and such. Lots of detail, lots of nature observations and lots of early memories make this an interestingly different and poignant read. Stay with it, it will grab you. ~ Sarah Broadhurst Costa Judges' comment: “A tough but tender, brilliant read full of fresh wonder. One to cherish.” One of our Books of the Year 2015. November 2015 Debut of the Month. Shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award 2015. Click here to read an article by Sara Baume on how she came to write this book.
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