Spill Simmer Falter Wither
ABOUT
THE BOOK
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. 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
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
Spill Simmer Falter Wither follows its first person narrator over the course of a year, starting from the moment when he buys a dog that he names One Eye. While the narrator has been mostly alone and inactive throughout his life, it is through his dog, a mutilated dog from an animal shelter, that he learns to see the world around him in a different light. Beautiful, sad and intense.
This novel is almost lyrical in its content, the use of language is sublime. Sara Baume has written a profound and moving work that captures an idiosyncratic world and lets the reader into it.