Eimear McBride

To say this demanding, brutal, and fractured novel is not for everyone is a terrific understatement. With a style inspired by James Joyce and a bleakness that Cormac McCarthy would be right at home with, it's no surprise that it took almost a decade to find a publisher, though once it did it took in a number of awards: Irish Novel of the Year, Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmith's Prize for fiction that "opens up new possibilities".

Essentially, the novel is about a young woman who suffers from a series of emotional and physical abuses and her own self-destructive behavioral responses to this abuse. Her father abandons the family before she's even born, while her toddler brother has a cancerous brain tumor. Her mother reacts by submersing herself in obsessive religiosity. Her uncle rapes her when she's 13. She comes of age and escapes to the city, acting out in self-harm but at least free to grope towards something better, but then her brother's cancer returns and she goes home and it all goes rotten.

The novel is written in fractured style, ignoring any and all good rules of grammar. This makes reading it hard work, except for those times when it feels like as the reader you get in a groove and can flow along with the rhythm of the words, understanding meaning on the conscious level, yes, but also catching meaning that seeps up from your subconscious. This didn't always happen for me and when it didn't the book felt like a struggle, but when it did, the book felt like genius. The fractured syntax could be said to reflect the protagonist's damaged state of mind, and this is very effectively the case as the story arc descends into greater horror and the writing becomes even more garbled and inchoate.

To illustrate the style, here's what I thought was a sterling passage describing what you might say was the beginning of her existence as a sexual being, around puberty:

Like smoke in my lungs to be coughed out. I'd throw up excitement. What is it? Like a nosebleed. Like a freezing pain. I felt me not me. Turning to the sun. Feel the roast of it. Like sunburn. Like a hot sunstroke. Like globs dropping in. Through my hair. Spat skin with it. Blank my eyes the dazzle. Huge shatter. Me who is just new. Fallen out of the sky. What. Is lust it? That's it. The first splinter. I.

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At first glance, I found the style of this book to be challenging; it's entirely composed of fragmented sentences and there are no quotations to suggest when dialogue begins or ends. However, as I made my way through the novel, I realized how much the style of the book influenced the reader. To me, each fragment of a sentence - especially those relating to self-esteem and blatant uncertainty - felt like the real, natural reaction to the situation at hand. Also, let me just put it out there: the sex in this book is the best sex I've ever read; it was awkward, it was vulnerable, it was steamy, and it felt real.

We follow Eily, an 18 year old student studying theater in London, who meets an older gentleman, Matthew, at a pub in town. At first she is a bit weary about their 20 year age difference, but gradually warms up to the idea of being intimate with a man with experience who appears to have it all together. She eventually learns more about Matthew and the two begin to see each other frequently. As the book progresses, it's clear that both Eily and Matthew have troubled pasts that are negatively influencing their current relationship.

I won't lie, this book really threw me for a loop; I was so surprised to see how emotionally invested I was in a story that exhibited the well overused "young girl falls for an older man" trope. I actually had to stop and put the book down a few times to cry... there was just something that was so beautifully intimate and vulnerable about the experimental writing in this book that completely tugged at my heartstrings.… (more)