How to Gut a Fish

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What to expect

Bloomsbury presents How to Gut a Fish by Sheila Armstrong, read by Aoife McMahon.

LONGLISTED FOR THE EDGE HILL PRIZE 2022
SHORTLISTED FOR SHORT STORY OF THE YEAR AT THE IRISH BOOK AWARDS 2022
SHORTLISTED FOR ALCS TOM-GALLON TRUST AWARD

'Unsettling, unpredictable, and brilliant' Roddy Doyle

'In sumptuous and evocative prose, Sheila Armstrong writes stories that are unnerving and unsettling. Stories which make you go, wait, wait, what was that? ' Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground

On a boat offshore, a fisherman guts a mackerel as he anxiously awaits a midnight rendezvous.

Villagers, one by one, disappear into a sinkhole beneath a yew tree.

A nameless girl is taped, bound and put on display in a countryside market.

A man returning home following the death of his mother finds something disturbing among her personal effects.

A dazzling and disquieting collection of stories, how to gut a fish places the bizarre beside the everyday and then elegantly and expertly blurs the lines. An exciting new Irish writer whose sharp and lyrical prose unsettles and astounds in equal measure, Sheila Armstrong’s exquisitely provocative stories carve their way into your mind and take hold.

'Dark, devilishly well written and full of atmosphere, How to Gut a Fish is one of the most original and affecting short story collections I’ve read in years' Jan Carson, author of The Fire Starters

Critics Review

The stories in this collection are unsettling, unpredictable, and brilliant
Roddy Doyle
In sumptuous and evocative prose, Sheila Armstrong writes stories that are unnerving and unsettling. Stories which make you go, wait, wait, what was that?
Claire Fuller, author of Unsettled Ground
Armstrong’s short stories make tremendously good company, each one transported me to a place I’d never been before. Dark, devilishly well written and full of atmosphere, How to Gut a Fish is one of the most original and affecting short story collections I’ve read in years.
Jan Carson, author of Malcolm Orange Disappears
Beautifully written, utterly original and more than a teeny bit disturbing.
Louise Kennedy, author of Trespasses
Do you know when you read a sentence that is so good, it does weird things to your insides? You kind of shudder with satisfaction and hope for more. Well, I am addicted to good sentences, and Sheila Armstrong is my dealer. The stories in How to Gut a Fish are gorgeously weird, inspiring curiosity both on and off the page. If you’re anything like me, they will send you into a fit of ferocious googling: What is star jelly? How old is the moon? The story titles are works of art in themselves. This is the good stuff. Hook it to my veins.
Louise Nealon, author of Snowflake
This collection of 11 stories is, from first to last, poised, distinctive and excellent
Wendy Erskine, Irish Times
Has a remarkable ability to summon a stingingly tangible sense of place in a few pen strokes. Again and again in her debut short story collection she lulls us and grounds us with honed, poetic descriptions of the natural landscape, the vagaries of the weather and the commonplace activities of everyday folk — only to introduce an element of strangeness or violence that makes you suddenly regard the ordinary with deep suspicion … Armstrong beguiles even as she totally unsettles you
The Times
Assured … impressive … Armstrong has a talent for disrupting our expectations and her prose is sensorily rich … Her evocations of landscape are extraordinary
Observer
Armstrong’s stories are rich with description, sight and sounds, textures and scents. The details come quickly, compressed, in close succession; the writing is forever being infused by sensations, both strange and new … Disquieting material, equanimous prose; in combining the two, Armstrong’s stories have a sinister finesse
Sunday Telegraph
This exquisitely wrought collection made me feel as if I were inhabiting another realm: sensuous, tactile, beautiful and disturbing. Sheila Armstrong's hypnotic prose has a haunting, lingering, dreamlike effect.
Lisa Harding, author of Bright Burning Things
It’s not often I open a book to find prose this exciting, original and frankly envy-inducing. Line by line, these stories set a series of small fires in my head, and they’re still burning
Zoe Gilbert, author of Folk
Uneasy, elegant … Armstrong delights in these contrasts, a delicious off-kilter sensibility that is spun out in silky prose and a startling turn of phrase … Weirdly wonderful
Daily Mail
I loved it. I found the stories completely hypnotic and strange. (Armstrong) has a meditative and mesmerising voice, and her description of everyday life is perceptive and profound.
Megan Bradbury, author of Everyone is Watching
A triumph ... A book entirely of and for the moment, possessed of the courage to document the horrors of a world unravelling and the wit to enhance its unflinching worldview with a wry dose of humanity
Lunate
Armstrong is a writer who must be noticed and read ... There are remarkable moments of clarity and beauty, making this an impressive and must-read debut. It is, most notably, the brilliant and disconcerting Red Market — an exceptional and unforgettable story that will forge How to Gut a Fish as a superb debut collection
The Word Factory
A striking, idiosyncratic collection … Beautifully expressed, studded with poetic images and the occasional flashes of humour
A Life in Books
A debut collection of short stories that brings readers uncomfortably close to the mortality of a set of memorable characters
Big Issue North

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