McBride, Eimear – The Bell Bookshop

The city changes its face

Emma — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A MUST-READ NOVEL OF 2025 IN THE GUARDIAN, FINANCIAL TIMES, IRISH TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES, STYLIST, AND MANY OTHERS

‘One of the finest writers at work today.’ ANNE ENRIGHT
‘McBride is a cartographer of the secret self, guiding us towards hidden treasure.’ CLAIRE KILROY
‘A writer for whom language is an end not a means, a beginning not an end.’ JEANETTE WINTERSON
‘A writer of remarkable power and originality.’ TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

So, all would be grand then, as far as the eye could see. Which it was, for a while. Up until the city, remembering its knives and forks, invited itself in to dine.

It’s 1995. Outside their grimy window, the city rushes by. But in the flat there is only Stephen and Eily. Their bodies, the tangled sheets. Unpacked boxes stacked in the kitchen and the total obsession of new love.

Eighteen months later, the flat feels different. Love is merging with reality. Stephen’s teenage daughter has re-appeared, while Eily has made a choice, the consequences of which she cannot outrun. Now they face a reckoning for all that’s been left unspoken – emotions, secrets and ambitions. Tonight, if they are to find one another again, what must be said aloud?

Love rallies against life. Time tells truths. The city changes its face.

Something Out of Place

Emma — Thu, 04 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The searing, must-read feminist essay from the author of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing’Fearless … A fierce and fascinating manifesto in McBride’s persuasive prose’ Sinéad Gleeson’Formidable’ VogueIn this galvanizing essay, Eimear McBride unpicks the contradictory forces of disgust and objectification that control and shame women. From playground taunts of ‘only sluts do it’ but ‘virgins are frigid’, to ladette culture, and the arrival of ‘ironic’ porn, via Debbie Harry, the Kardashians and the Catholic church – she looks at how this prejudicial messaging has played out in the past, and still surrounds us today. McBride asks – are women still damned if we do, damned if we don’t? How can we give our daughters (and sons) the unbounded futures we want for them? And, in this moment of global crisis, might our gift for juggling contradiction help us to find a way forward?’A satisfying feminist polemic’ Susie Orbach’Remarkable’ Scotsman’Eimear McBride is that old fashioned thing, a genius’ Guardian

Strange Hotel

Emma — Thu, 18 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

From the winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction

‘Powerful . . . truly a living and breathing thing.’ Financial Times

‘McBride is on blistering form.’ Sinéad Gleeson

‘Nothing else feels so fresh, so radically new.’ Garth Greenwell

‘An emotionally enchanting novel that gets deep under the skin.’ Dazed

A woman enters an Avignon hotel room. She’s been here once before – but while the room hasn’t changed, she is a different person now.

Forever caught between check-in and check-out, she will go on to occupy other hotel rooms, from Prague to Oslo, Auckland to Austin, each as anonymous as the last. There, amid the open suitcases, the matchbooks, cigarettes, keys and room-service wine, she will negotiate with memory, with the men she sometimes meets, and with what it might mean to return home.