When Baileys announced its sponsorship of the women's prize for fiction last year, there were mischievous musings about what sort of novel one might wash down with such a sweet tipple. The inaugural winner, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, is certainly not a cream liqueur kind of book.
Jaggedly uncompromising in both style and subject matter, it languished unpublished for a decade before being picked up by a fledgling independent house. Since its publication last summer, when Anne Enright hailed it in the Guardian as an "instant classic", it's been feted by the sort of prize juries that set out to reward stylistic innovation, winning the Goldsmiths prize and being shortlisted for the first Folio prize. That it should now bag an award that traditionally keeps accessibility in mind is a surprise, but a wonderful one.
Eimear McBride's small, incredibly dense novel is the inner narrative of an Irish girl from before birth to the verge of death, written to capture what McBride calls "the moment before language becomes formatted thought": "For you. You'll soon. You'll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she'll wear your say. Mammy me? Yes you."
There's a rural childhood, an absent father, a viciously controlling mother, rape by an uncle and bitter promiscuity; through it all runs the narrator's tender relationship with her brother, doomed by a brain tumour. "God, sex, death, religion, shame, here it all is," McBride has said of her eminently Irish themes. She's firmly in the Irish modernist tradition of Beckett and Joyce, with a nod to Edna O'Brien's Country Girls, but what's so fresh and impressive are the female perspective and emotional charge she brings to a style some might have considered historical. This is a novel so emotionally overwhelming that it can be hard to finish a sentence, but also one in which each line repays thought and second reading. It almost didn't make it into print at all, but it will stay with every reader – and the Baileys prize can only widen its appeal. Justine Jordan
