New york review of books fiction

Now, at fifty-seven, he finds a kindred spirit in hairy, malodorous One Eye, who is prone to aggression. Ray was bullied as a schoolboy-“I didn’t really believe I was of the same species” as other children, he says-and his father cruelly neglected him. Her first novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither (2015), tells the story of Ray, a self-proclaimed misfit who goes on the run in rural Ireland with One Eye, his adopted dog. Are novelists required to like humans? It’s fair to say, on the evidence of her published writing, that Sara Baume is not a people person.