Spill Simmer Falter Wither

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.

Winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature for 2015 Winner of theSunday Independent Newcomer of the Year Award (Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards 2015)  Winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize?  Finalist for the LA Times Book Prize—Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction Short-listed for the Costa First Novel Award  Long-listed for the Desmond Elliott Prize  Long-listed for The Guardian First Book Award 2015, A Readers' Choice  Long-listed for the Warwick Prize for Writing 2015  Long-listed for 2015 Edinburgh First Novel Award ?Nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award 2017  One of NPR's "Best Books of 2016"  One of the Wall Street Journal's "Best Books of 2016" Barnes & Noble Spring 2016 Discover Great New Writers  March 2016 Indie Next Pick 2016 Winter/Spring Indies Introduce Pick   "A tour de force.... No writer since JM Coetzee or Cormac McCarthy has written about an animal with such intensity. This is a novel bursting with brio, braggadocio and bite. Again and again it wows you with its ambition…At its heart is a touching and inspiriting sense of empathy, that rarest but most human of traits. Boundaries melt, other hearts become knowable…This book is a stunning and wonderful achievement by a writer touched by greatness."—Joseph O'Connor, for The Irish Times   “This book is like a flame in daylight: beautiful and unexpected. It packs a big effect for something that seems so slight, and almost hard to see.”—Anne Enright   “Unbearably poignant and beautifully told.”—Eimear McBride, author of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing   “For language that sounds like music, there’s Sara Baume’s Spill Simmer Falter Wither, about a lonely Irish outcast and his one-eyed rescue dog.”—Anne Tyler, New York Times Book Review, “The Year in Reading”   “A deeply attuned portrait of the human mind…An unsettling literary surprise of the best sort. This first novel’s voice is singular in its humility and imaginative range…Baume’s novel revels in aesthetic leaps and dives, embracing the poetry of sensory experience in all its baffling beauty from the title onward…Baume’s prose makes sure we look and listen. Her book insists we take notice.”—The Atlantic   "[Baume] has a way with words...As you sink into the rhythms of Baume's prose, you can almost smell the salt air and feel the sting of a small town that can be unforgiving to those who are different."—NPR, "Best Books of 2016"   "Lonely man adopts unloved dog and both their lives are changed: You’ve heard this story before, but you’ve never seen it described with such transfiguring beauty and intensity. Sara Baume does with language what the dog does for her wayward loner of a hero: She makes the world appear new."—Wall Street Journal, "The 20 Books That Defined Our Year – The Best Fiction and Nonfiction of 2016"   “Extraordinary . . . Spill Simmer Falter Wither is a heartbreaking read, and heralds Baume as a major new talent.” —Independent on Sunday   "A deft and moving debut...To capture this constrained setting and quiet character requires specific skills, which Baume has in spades...It’s not easy to tell such a sparse tale, to be so economic with story, but the book hums with its own distinctiveness, presenting in singing prose an unforgettable landsca —