Readers' rating:
Publishes
Jun 4, 2024
240 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Award-winning author Claire Kilroy's exquisite and provocative novel that reads with the pace of a thriller and is filled with astute and witty observations of life with a young child.
Claire Kilroy takes readers deep inside the early days of motherhood. Exploring the clash of fierce love with a seismic shift in identity, Kilroy conjures the raw, tumultuous emotions of a new mother, as her marriage strains and she struggles with questions of equality, autonomy, and creativity.
Soldier Sailor is a tale of boundless love and relentless battle, a bedtime story to a son, Sailor, recounting their early years together. Spending her days in baby groups, playgrounds, and supermarkets, Soldier doesn't know who she is anymore. She hardly sees her husband, who has taken to working late most nights. A chance encounter with a former colleague feels like a lifeline to the person she used to be but can hardly remember.
Tender and harrowing, Kilroy's modern masterpiece portrays parenthood in all its agony and ardent joy.
"The narrator's wit, brutal honesty, and unsentimental love for her child set this book apart… a sharp, funny, often painful yet hopeful take on adjusting to motherhood." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A searing portrait of the early years of parenting… Kilroy succeeds in offering readers a glimpse into motherhood that feels as primal as it is poetic, a brilliant reflection of how impossibly enormous all emotions become in the transition into motherhood. Raw and honest, Soldier Sailor will leave readers white-knuckled at the end of an emotional roller-coaster of anguish and joy alike that perfectly encapsulates the extremes of becoming a parent." —Shelf Awareness
"Virtuosic ... a resonant and important book, vital in all senses of the word, a flare sent up from the shores of early motherhood, a lesson in surviving the wilderness." —Irish Times
"Not a word is wasted in this profound short novel ... Soldier Sailor is a novel which is about time and language as much as parenthood ... A stylistic whirlwind that left me breathless." —The Independent (UK)
"Claire Kilroy made me cry. The ending to her novel is beautiful, tender, noble even. A happy ending that makes you cry—surely that's the best of both worlds. Kilroy makes a well-trodden subject feel original by combining literary skill with warmth, humor and wicked observations of everyday life. On nearly every page there was a sentence or an observation that I wanted to underline because it was funny, lovely or real." —The Times (UK)
"A whole-body experience ... it comes at you full-throttle, as if delivered on a single breath... . [Read] alongside the likes of Helen Simpson, Rachel Cusk and Sarah Moss." —The Guardian (UK)
"Brilliant, brutally honest, very funny ... A novel that immediately feels like the definitive work on modern motherhood, one that breaks every taboo." —The Sunday Times (UK)
"My favorite novel this year, Soldier Sailor manages, extraordinarily, to capture the frayed nerves and frittered mind of a woman with a young child, trying to recalibrate after childbirth. Addressed to her infant son as he begins his maiden voyage, a woman stares at the narrowing margins of her world, trying to get a foothold. She undergoes a near-hallucinatory deprivation of self, a kind of dazzling blackout. This is the diamond-sharp story that lies beneath the peaceful, swaying bassinet; the story of the cataclysmic, earth-shaking shift of one life gone off the rails just as another is set on its tracks." —Sarah Blakley-Cartwright, author of Alice Sadie Celine
"A novel about motherhood that captures the chaos, exhaustion, and almost unbearable moments of joy so perfectly. It's very moving and also very funny." —Paul Murray
This information about Soldier Sailor was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Claire Kilroy is the author of five novels including Soldier Sailor, All Summer, Tenderwire, and The Devil I Know. She was awarded the Rooney Prize in 2004 and has been shortlisted for many other prizes, including the Irish Novel of the Year and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. She studied at Trinity College and lives in Dublin.
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