McGlue

Description

Man Booker Shortlisted Ottessa Moshfegh's blistering first novel- 'A wonderwork of virtuoso prose and truths that will make you squirm and concur' Gary Lutz Discover the blistering first novella from the from the Booker-shortlisted author of Eileen and My Year of Rest and Relaxation. They said I've done something wrong?... And they've just left me down here to starve. Haven't had a drop in days more so... Salem, Massachusetts, 1851- McGlue is in the hold, still too drunk to be sure of his name or situation or orientation - he may have killed a man. That man may have been his best friend. Now, McGlue wants one thing and one thing only- a drink. Because for McGlue, insufferable, terrifying memories accompany sobriety. Asail on the high seas of literary tradition, Ottessa Moshfegh gives us an unforgettable blackguard on a knife-sharp voyage through the fogs of recollection.

Ottessa Moshfegh is a fiction writer from Boston. Her novel Eileen was awarded the 2016 Pen/Hemingway Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Her short fiction has earned her the Paris Review Plimpton Prize, a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, and an O. Henry Award. Her collection Homesick for Another World was published in January 2017. McGlue was her debut novel, and the winner of the Fence Modern Prize for Prose and the Believer Book Award. This is the first time the book is published here in the U.K.

Wonderful * Guardian * Strange and beautiful * LA Times * A gorgeously sordid story of love and murder on the high seas and in reeky corners of mid-nineteenth-century New York and points North. McGlue is a wonderwork of virtuoso prose and truths that will make you squirm and concur -- Gary Lutz You're in safe, if sticky hands with an Ottessa Moshfegh story... Everything bulges and reeks in this novella, which feels as if it was written in a permanent state of nausea... The plot spins faster than its main character's head. What elevates this novella are the scalpelsharp observations about McGlue's nihilism and her prose, which is as distilled as the liquor McGlue necks. It's a wild ride. -- Fiona Wilson * The Times * Moshfegh is... a superlative short-story writer... McGlue, which owes as much to Cormac McCarthy as it does to Poe or Melville, is an entertaining curio with some lovely baroque flourishes. -- Alasdair Lees * Independent *