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Spill Simmer Falter Wither
Sara Baume
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Description for Spill Simmer Falter Wither
Paperback. 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. Num Pages: 288 pages. BIC Classification: FA. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 199 x 130 x 20. Weight in Grams: 208.
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 ... Read morefor 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
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Product Details
Place of Publication
London, United Kingdom
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 2 to 4 working days
About Sara Baume
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 ... Read moreAward, 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. Show Less
Reviews for Spill Simmer Falter Wither
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 ... Read moreIrish 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.
Anne Tyler
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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