An extraordinary and heartbreaking debut by a major new talent.
Sara Baume was born in Lancashire and grew up in County Cork, Ireland. She studied fine art and creative writing and her fiction and criticism have been published in anthologies, newspapers and journals such as the Irish Times, the Guardian, The Stinging Fly and Granta magazine. She has won the Davy Byrne's Short Story Award, the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award, the Rooney Prize for Literature, an Irish Book Award for Best Newcomer and the Kate O'Brien Award. Her debut novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither, was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the Warwick Prize for Writing and the Desmond Elliott Prize. She has received a Literary Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A Line Made by Walking is her second novel. She lives in West Cork.
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*
A stunning and wonderful achievement by a writer touched by
greatness. It is the most powerful debut novel I have read in
several years . . . An outstanding new Irish novelist.
*Joseph O'Connor*
Unbearably poignant and beautifully told.
*Eimear McBride, author of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing*
At the foundations of the novel is the issue of what happens when a
community fails those who need it most ... Baume turns the
commonplace minutiae of changing seasons, thoughts and people into
the remarkable.
*Sunday Times*
A fascinating portrait of the friendship a man develops with his
dog and the companionship he also finds in books…Fear curdles
through this story, which skilfully builds suspense as it discloses
their painful pasts…The lyrical language is most alive when evoking
landscape…Baume [has] a gift for inventive use of language…Baume
succeeds is reawakening her reader’s capacity for wonder…so much so
that the book and its one-eyed dog became companions I was loathe
to leave.
*Observer*
Extraordinary . . . Spill Simmer Falter Wither is a heartbreaking
read, and heralds Baume as a major new talent.
*Independent on Sunday*
So far this year, I’ve read 103 books. You can understand why they
might be blurring in my mind by now. Eight of them, though, are as
distinct to me today as they were while I was reading them, and
each for a different reason. For language that sounds like music,
there’s Sara Baume’s Spill Simmer Falter Wither, about a lonely
Irish outcast and his one-eyed rescue dog.
*New York Times Book Review*
Baume’s sympathy for her 'wonkety' characters is infectious and
their relationship – in all its drama and ordinariness –
beautifully conveyed. Places and smells, plants and animals are
conjured with loving attention, the narrative propelled by a
striking linguistic intensity…Baume’s capacity for wonder turns
this portrait of an unusual friendship into a powerful meditation
on humanity.
*New Statesman*
Every so often a book comes along that is so perfect it takes your
breath away, and leaves your heart hammering with the beauty of the
writing and the sadness of the story. Sara Baume’s debut, Spill
Simmer Falter Wither, is such a book … Baume’s prose is full of
wonder – inventive, poetic and dazzling, concerned with the
smallest details of the natural landscape and the terrains of human
emotion. Absolutely astounding.
*Psychologies*
A deft and moving debut…To capture this constrained setting and
quiet character requires specific skills, which Baume has in
spades…It’s a claustrophobic, affecting debut and Baume has a rare
ability to look afresh at muted scenes and ordinary objects…It’s
not easy to tell such a sparse tale, to be so economic with story,
but the book hums with its own distinctiveness, presenting in
singing prose an unforgettable landscape peopled by two unlikely
Beckettian wanderers, where hope is not yet lost.
*Guardian*
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