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Book review: A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing, by Eimear McBride

By Catriona Ferguson In Books

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“For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say. Mammy me? Yes you. Bounce the bed, I’d say.” These are the opening lines of Eimear McBride’s extraordinary debut novel, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing. They help explain why the manuscript sat in slush piles for years: fractured sentences, minimalist punctuation, a heavy reliance on personal pronouns in the absence of names and a discordant tone are hardly a marketing department’s dream. Stylistically, the novel is certainly unconventional. Yet although the frenetic, ranting ...

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