The Washington Post calls Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing a minor literary legend. This debut novel from Ireland lay wasted in a drawer for nine years until Gallery Beggar, a small press in England, picked it up. It made it to the other side of the globe too, thanks to another small publisher – Coffee House Press in America.

It won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Bailey's Women’s Prize. All put together, it made McBride richer by about $100,000.

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing follows the inner narrative of a girl, from womb to twenty, who grows up with a staunchly religious mother, a terminally ill brother and witnesses a range of traumas – sexual abuse, violence, alcoholism and paedophilia. But as Charlotte Freeman says in her review: “This is no middlebrow novel of sorrow redeemed.”

It is written in a stream of consciousness style and the sheer aliveness of the language and the acute awareness of the girl herself – how she absolutely owns her experience, without rancour, without self-pity – is what really charges the reader. “McBride rejects the tyranny of the redemption narrative to tell a more difficult story. She tells a tale with such energy and drive that despite a story that really might give you nightmares, this remains a book that electrifies.”

The novel has been made into a successful theatre production by Annie Ryan who, when read aloud the first chapters, was gasping in horror. In March 2016 CB editions published About a Girl: A Reader's Guide to Eimear McBride's A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing by David Collard. This offers a full record of the progress of McBride’s novel from its writing to the final stage adaptation, and a critical account of the novel’s reclamation of modernism.

Published in 2013.