-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
by Eimear McBride
A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is a revelatory work of fiction, a novel that instantly takes its place in the canon.
In scathing, furious, unforgettable prose, Eimear McBride tells the story of a young girl's devastating adolescence as she and her brother, who suffers from a brain tumor, struggle for a semblance of normalcy in the shadow of sexual abuse, denial, and chaos at home. Plunging readers inside the psyche of a girl isolated by her own dangerously confusing sexuality, pervading guilt, and unrelenting trauma, McBride's writing carries echoes of Joyce, O'Brien, and Woolf.
Winner, Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, 2014
Winner, Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, 2014
Winner, Goldsmiths Prize, 2013
Paperback: June 2015. First published in hardcover by Coffee House Press 2014
About the Author
Eimear McBride was born in 1976 and grew up in Ireland. At twenty-seven she wrote A Girl is a Half-formed Thing and spent the next nine years trying to have it published. Visit her at eimearmcbride.com
Women's Prize, 2014
"Starred Review. The narration is written in a Joycean stream of consciousness with an Irish lilt, and sentence fragments transmit the pervasive sense of urgency, of thoughts spinning faster than the tongue can speak." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Lovers of straightforward storytelling will shirk, but open-minded readers (specifically those not put off by the unusual language structure) will be surprised, moved and awed by this original novel...This is exhilarating fiction from a voice to watch." - Kirkus
"Amazing writing." - Library Journal
"It is always a wonderful and satisfying thing to hear that an unknown debut author has won a major prize for writing." - Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Eimear McBride is a writer of remarkable power and originality." - The Times Literary Supplement (UK)
"An instant classic." - The Guardian (UK)
"[The book] is formally groundbreaking, and has been declared a work of "genius" by Man Booker winner Anne Enright...the establishment, in other words, is remaking itself in the image of the revolutionary." -The Telegraph (UK)
"It's hard to imagine another narrative that would justify this way of telling, but perhaps McBride can build another style from scratch for another style of story. That's a project for another day, when this little book is famous." - London Review of Books (UK)
"McBride has arrived as a fully-formed talent...Few literary debuts in recent years have been so assured. Her writing combines the beautify, the outrageous, the harrowing, the farcical and the heartbreaking in a courageously original, wholly uncommercial style, uncompromisingly experimental and an important addition to the literary avant-garde, its roots in 1920s modernism but also in contemporary life." - The White Review
"The tome of the moment remains Eimear McBride's A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing – believe the hype, she's the real deal." - The Independent (Ireland)
"A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is simply a brilliant book - entirely emotionally raw and at the same time technically astounding. Her prose is as haunting and moving as music, and the love story at the heart of the novel - between a sister and brother - as true and wrenching as any in literature." - Elizabeth McCracken
"My discovery of the year was Eimear McBride's debut novel A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing."- Eleanor Catton
This information about A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing 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.
Lovers of straightforward storytelling will shirk, but open-minded readers (specifically those not put off by the unusual language structure) will be surprised, moved and awed by this original novel...This is exhilarating fiction from a voice to watch." - Kirkus starred review
This discussion will open on July 21 and will stay open for about 6 weeks
If you liked A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, try these:
by Linn Ullmann
Published 2026
Called a "masterpiece" (Ali Smith), this stunning novel explores desire and anxiety, beauty and youth, memory and power.
by Melissa Febos
Published 2026
From the national bestselling author of Girlhood, an examination of the solitude, freedoms, and feminist heroes Melissa Febos discovered during a year of celibacy. A wise and transformative look at relationships and self-knowledge.
by Michelle de Kretser
Published 2026
A new novel of startling intelligence from prizewinning Australian author Michelle de Kretser, following a writer looking back on her young adulthood and grappling with what happens when life smashes through the boundaries of art.
Theo of Golden by Allen Levi
One spring morning, a stranger arrives in the small southern city of Golden. No one knows where he has come from…or why…
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
