Spill Simmer Falter Wither - Softcover

Baume Sara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099592746 ISBN 13: 9780099592747

Publisher: WINDMILL, 2015

Synopsis

SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA FIRST NOVEL AWARD 2015

LONGLISTED FOR THE GUARDIAN FIRST BOOK AWARD 2015

LONGLISTED FOR THE DESMOND ELLIOTT PRIZE 2016

WINNER OF THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT NEWCOMER OF THE YEAR, IRISH BOOK AWARDS 2015

WINNER OF THE GEOFFREY FABER MEMORIAL PRIZE FOR FICTION


You find me on a Tuesday, on my Tuesday trip to town. A note sellotaped to the inside of the jumble-shop window: COMPASSIONATE & TOLERANT OWNER. A PERSON WITHOUT OTHER PETS & WITHOUT CHILDREN UNDER FOUR.

A misfit man finds a misfit dog. Ray, aged fifty-seven, ‘too old for starting over, too young for giving up’, and One Eye, a vicious little bugger, smaller than expected, a good ratter. Both are accustomed to being alone, unloved, outcast – but they quickly find in each other a strange companionship of sorts. As spring turns to summer, their relationship grows and intensifies, until a savage act forces them to abandon the precarious life they’d established, and take to the road.
Spill Simmer Falter Wither is a wholly different kind of love story: a devastating portrait of loneliness, loss and friendship, and of the scars that are more than skin-deep. Written with tremendous empathy and insight, in lyrical language that surprises and delights, this is an extraordinary and heartbreaking debut by a major new talent

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature
Winner of the Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year Award
Short-listed for the Costa First Novel Award
Long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award, Readers Choice
Long-listed for the Warwick Prize for Writing
Long-listed for the Edinburgh First Book Award

Unbearably poignant and beautifully told. Eimear McBride, author of A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing

A tour de force ... No writer since J.M. Coetzee or Cormac McCarthy has written about an animal with such intensity ... At its heart is a touching and inspiriting sense of empathy, that rarest but most human of traits. Boundaries melt, other hearts become knowable ... This book is a stunning and wonderful achievement by a writer touched by greatness. Joseph O Connor, the Irish Times

In a relentlessly inventive language that, it seems, can maneuver anywhere and describe anything, Baume s story of a man and his dog examines and elegizes the myriad strange, ramshackle, and ephemeral worlds locked deep inside the world. An exceptional, startling, and original book. Colin Barrett, author of Young Skins

Powerful, heartbreaking, told with great control. The writing is superb ... I had an image of all language standing to attention, eager to serve this writer. Mary Costello, author of Academy Street

This book is like a flame in daylight: beautiful and unexpected. It packs a big effect for something that seems so slight, and almost hard to see. Anne Enright

"

From the Inside Flap:

Extraordinary ... A heartbreaking read, and heralds Baume as a major new talent. Independent on Sunday

It is springtime, and two outcasts a man invisible to his village and the one-eyed dog he takes into his quiet, tightly shuttered life find each other, by accident or fate, and forge an unlikely connection. Over the four seasons echoed in the title, Ray opens up to One-Eye, telling him the stories of his life. Then their small seaside town suddenly takes note of them, falsely perceiving menace where there is only mishap. The unlikely duo must take to the road.

Gorgeously written in poetic, mesmerizing prose, Spill Simmer Falter Witherhas garnered wild support in its native Ireland, where the Irish Times pointed to Baume s astonishing power with language and praised it as a novel bursting with brio, braggadocio, and bite.

A moving depiction of how a relationship between fellow injured creatures can bring comfort to each, this is also a celebration of the wonders of this earth that will leave you breathless with hope and expanded in spirit. One of those rare stories that utterly, completely imagines its way into a life most of us would never see, it transforms us not only in our understanding of the world, but also of ourselves.
"

About this edition

• Publisher: WINDMILL
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0099592746
• ISBN 13: 9780099592747
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288