Eimear McBride's award-winning debut is an unforgettable novel from a major new literary talent. A Girl is a Half-formed Thing tells the story of a young woman's relationship with her brother, and the long shadow cast by his childhood brain tumour. It is a shocking and intimate insight into the thoughts, feelings and chaotic sexuality of a vulnerable and isolated protagonist. The author's spellbinding reading illuminates every nuance of the text with feeling and sympathy. The listener enters the narrator's head, experiencing her world first hand. This isn't always comfortable - but it is always a revelation
WINNER OF THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION, 2014; WINNER OF THE DESMOND ELLIOTT PRIZE, 2014
KERRY GROUP IRISH NOVEL OF THE YEAR AWARD, 2014; WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE, 2014
Eimear McBride was born in 1976 in Liverpool to Northern Irish parents. Aged two she and her family returned to Ireland and her childhood was mostly spent in Tubbercurry, Co. Sligo. At fourteen they moved again to Castlebar, Co Mayo. In 1994, at seventeen, she went to London and spent the next three years studying acting at Drama Centre. Much of her twenties were spent temping and travelling. At twenty-seven she wrote A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. It won the 2013 Goldsmiths Prize, was shortlisted for the 2014 Folio Prize and was longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2014. She moved to Cork in 2006, and Norwich in 2011, where she currently lives with her husband and daughter. She is working on her second novel.
In 2014 Eimear McBride's novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing was awarded the inaugural Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.
