Spill Simmer Falter Wither
2017 Longlist

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

 

ABOUT
THE AUTHOR Sara
Baume

Sara Baume was born in Lancashire and grew up in County Cork, Ireland. She studied fine art and creative writing and her fiction and criticism have been published in anthologies, newspapers and journals such as the Irish Times, The GuardianThe Stinging Fly and Granta magazine. She has won the Davy Byrne’s Short Story Award, the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award, the Rooney Prize for Literature, an Irish Book Award for Best Newcomer and the Kate O’Brien Award.

Her debut novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the Warwick Prize for Writing and the Desmond Elliott Prize. She has received a Literary Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A Line Made by Walking is her second novel.

She lives in West Cork.

Sara Baume was born in Lancashire and grew up in County Cork, Ireland. She studied fine art and creative writing and her fiction and criticism have been published in anthologies, newspapers and journals such as the Irish Times, The GuardianThe Stinging Fly and Granta magazine. She has won the Davy Byrne’s Short Story Award, the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award, the Rooney Prize for Literature, an Irish Book Award for Best Newcomer and the Kate O’Brien Award.

Her debut novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, the Warwick Prize for Writing and the Desmond Elliott Prize. She has received a Literary Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico. A Line Made by Walking is her second novel.

She lives in West Cork.

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.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Date published
08/10/2015
Author
Publisher
Windmill / William Heinemann

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