RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)This book is about sentences, but it is also about writers; those crafts-folk that string words together, like lanterns, across this inky, squally sea of existence. Each chapter begins with a single sentence Brian Dillon was drawn to and copied down, in notebooks over the years – \'out of a teeming sky of inscriptions, these are the few that shine more brightly\' – and now offers up to us, with his singular, remarkable exploration of it ... Dillon approaches language like a child outdoors before indifference has kicked in. The writing is honest, hungry and full of wonder. We are met with variety everywhere in Dillon’s choices: writer and subject, style and length, and, most affectingly – his own views on it all ... This exceptional book is the sky after an eclipse, full of silvery words; dancing, like bright fledglings.
Sophie Mackintosh
RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)... a timely meditation on what it means to be a woman, a mother and its (supposed) unnamed \'opposite\'. Once, not so long ago, I’d have termed it \'dystopian\' ... The layout feels so refreshing: sections with chapters of varying lengths. The first chapter is a single page consisting of five short paragraphs. The book reflects the world it speaks of and implores us to keep up. I found it fascinating how quickly the action unfolds; there is very little build-up and it is positively thrilling ... There is almost constant drama: this is a book to set the blood coursing through your veins. Set in an eerily familiar time and place as any we still know, yet as fantastical and other as Atwood’s Gilead, it’s about being human, simply. About being alive in troubling, confusing times – about finding our way through the “reality” enforced upon us – both externally and internally ... This remarkable novel acts as a crucial reminder that, in essence, the body we are born into (and its own respective journey) is in part a gamble in which the self we so willingly categorise plays a somewhat minor role ... This book might reshape your views on much, perhaps even your relationship with being alive.
