Spill Simmer Falter Wither - Tapa blanda

"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)

"A stunning and wonderful achievement by a writer touched by greatness. It is the most powerful debut novel I have read in several years . . . An outstanding new Irish novelist." (Joseph O'Connor)

"Unbearably poignant and beautifully told." (Eimear McBride, author of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing)

"At the foundations of the novel is the issue of what happens when a community fails those who need it most ... Baume turns the commonplace minutiae of changing seasons, thoughts and people into the remarkable." (Sunday Times)

"Every so often a book comes along that is so perfect it takes your breath away, and leaves your heart hammering with the beauty of the writing and the sadness of the story. Sara Baume’s debut, Spill Simmer Falter Wither, is such a book ... Baume’s prose is full of wonder – inventive, poetic and dazzling, concerned with the smallest details of the natural landscape and the terrains of human emotion. Absolutely astounding." (Psychologies)

This book is longlisted for the guardian first book award. You find me on a Tuesday, on my Tuesday trip to town. A note sellotaped to the inside of the jumble-shop window: compassionate & tolerant owner. A person without other pets & without children under four. 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.