The dazzling, fearless debut novel that won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction and the book the New York Times hails as a future classic.

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. A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is a revelatory work of fiction, a novel that instantly takes its place in the canon.

A breathtaking award-winning novel about an extraordinary, all-consuming love affair

One night an eighteen-year-old Irish girl, recently arrived in London to attend drama school, meets an older man--a well-regarded actor in his own right. While she is naive and thrilled by life in the big city, he is haunted by more than a few demons, and the clamorous relationship that ensues risks undoing them both.

A captivating story of passion and innocence, joy and discovery set against the vibrant atmosphere of 1990s London over the course of a single year, The Lesser Bohemians glows with the eddies and anxieties of growing up, and the transformative intensity of a powerful new love.

Winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction
Shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award
Shortlisted for the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize
Shortlisted for the 2016 Bord G is Energy Irish Book Awards Eason Novel of the Year

A most anticipated novel of 2025 in the Guardian, Financial Times, Irish Times, New Statesman, Independent, Sunday Times, and Stylist

One of the finest writers at work today. ANNE ENRIGHT

Her prose is as haunting and moving as music. ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN

McBride is a cartographer of the secret self, guiding us towards hidden treasure. CLAIRE KILROY

So, all would be grand then, as far as the eye could see. Which it was, for a while. Up until the city, remembering its knives and forks, invited itself in to dine.

It's 1995. Outside their grimy window, the city rushes by. But in the flat there is only Stephen and Eily. Their bodies, the tangled sheets. Unpacked boxes stacked in the kitchen and the total obsession of new love.

Eighteen months later, the flat feels different. Love is merging with reality. Stephen's teenage daughter has re-appeared, while Eily has made a choice, the consequences of which she cannot outrun. Now they face a reckoning for all that's been left unspoken - emotions, secrets and ambitions. Tonight, if they are to find one another again, what must be said aloud?

Love rallies against life. Time tells truths. The city changes its face.

From Eimear McBride, author of the award-winning A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, comes the beguiling travelogue of a woman in exile: from her past, her ghosts, and herself.

A nameless woman enters a hotel room. She's been here once before. In the years since, the room hasn't changed, but she has. Forever caught between check-in and check-out, she will go on to occupy other hotel rooms. From Avignon to Oslo, Auckland to Austin, each is as anonymous as the last but bound by rules of her choosing. There, amid the detritus of her travels, the matchbooks, cigarettes, keys and room-service wine, she negotiates with her memories, with the men she sometimes meets, with the clich s invented to aggravate middle-aged women, with those she has lost or left behind--and with what it might mean to return home.

Urgent and immersive, filled with black humour and desire, McBride's Strange Hotel is a novel of enduring emotional force.

Winner of numerous literary awards including the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and the Goldsmiths Prize, Eimear McBride's debut novel A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing plunges us into the psyche of a girl with breathtaking fury and intimacy.

Adapted for the stage by Annie Ryan for The Corn Exchange, Eimear McBride's A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing premiered at the Dublin Theatre Festival 2014.

Winner, Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, 2014
Winner, Desmond Elliott Prize, 2014
Winner, Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, 2014
Winner, Goldsmiths Prize, 2013
Finalist for the Folio Prize
Shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize
NPR's Best Books of 2014
The New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Books of 2014
#3 on Time Out New York's 10 best books of 2014
Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Library Journal's Best Books of 2014
Boston Globe Best Fiction of 2014
Chicago Tribune Printers Row Journal Best Books of 2014
Star Tribune Best Fiction of 2014
Electric Literature 25 Best Novels of 2014
Largehearted Boy Favorite Novels of 2014

Eimear McBride is a writer of remarkable power and originality.--The Times Literary Supplement

An instant classic.--The Guardian

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

In edgy, hazy, stream-of-consciousness prose, Eimear McBride transports you directly into her narrator's mind and heart, making this experimental, award-winning novel totally unforgettable.--Bustle

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. This is a book about everything: family, faith, sex, home, transcendence, violence, and love. I can't recommend it highly enough.--Elizabeth McCracken

McBride's A Girl is a Half-formed Thing is a game-changer, a disruptor, a grenade of a novel, and we all agreed this had to win.--Isabel Berwick

My discovery of the year was Eimear McBride's debut novel A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing.--Eleanor Catton

Eimear McBride's acclaimed debut tells the story of a young woman's relationship with her brother, and the long shadow cast by his childhood brain tumor, touching on everything from family violence to sexuality and the personal struggle to remain intact in times of intense trauma.

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.

Perhaps no debut has been more thrilling than Eimear McBride's Girl is a Half-formed Thing.-- SF Weekly

Undoubtedly my standout read of the year, A Girl is A Half-formed Thing is an exciting and innovative debut.-- Glasgow Review of Books

Irish author Eimear McBride earned hosannas for her first novel with the very evocative 'A Girl is a Half Formed Thing'.-- Indian Express

[McBride] reframes our expectations of prose and clarifies an urgent reality: we are all half-formed, to some degree. --The Colorado Review

Three dazzling texts from the award-winning Eimear McBride.

Written during her time as the inaugural fellow in the Beckett archive last year, Eimear McBride's three pieces -- characteristically brilliant texts collected in one work, Mouthpieces.

Each text depicts a fragment of female experience, all of them told in in Eimear's vivid, original and sharp-witted style. In 'The Adminicle Exists', we hear the inner voice of a woman who saves her troubled, dangerous partner; in 'An Act of Violence', a woman is quizzed about her reaction to a man's death; in 'The Eye Machine', the character 'Eye' tells of her imprisonment, flickering through a slideshow of female stereotypes.

Eimear McBride unpicks the contradictory forces of disgust and objectification that control and shame women. From playground taunts of 'only sluts do it' but 'virgins are frigid', to ladette culture, and the arrival of 'ironic' porn, via Debbie Harry, the Kardashians and the Catholic church - she looks at how this prejudicial messaging has played out in the past, and still surrounds us today. In this subversive essay, McBride asks - are women still damned if we do, damned if we don't? How can we give our daughters (and sons) the unbounded futures we want for them? And, in this moment of global crisis, might our gift for juggling contradiction help us to find a way forward?

Eimear McBride unpicks the contradictory forces of disgust and objectification that control and shame women. From playground taunts of 'only sluts do it' but 'virgins are frigid', to ladette culture, and the arrival of 'ironic' porn, via Debbie Harry, the Kardashians and the Catholic church - she looks at how this prejudicial messaging has played out in the past, and still surrounds us today. In this subversive essay, McBride asks - are women still damned if we do, damned if we don't? How can we give our daughters (and sons) the unbounded futures we want for them? And, in this moment of global crisis, might our gift for juggling contradiction help us to find a way forward?