A truly extraordinary work: vivid, passionate and utterly compelling. The Sound of One Hand Clapping is raw as a wound. It opens a world that is strange, brutal and poetic at once and ultimately achieves the kind of spirit-healing few novels do

The world is more outlandish than some people’s imaginations.

We tell stories. We tell stories to pass the time, to leave the world for a while, or go more deeply into it. We tell stories to heal the pain of living.

Hope may or may not be a Thing with Feathers. But it’s definitely a Thing with Claws.

When my father first took me to Ennis Library I went down among the shelves and felt company, not only the company of writers, but the readers too, because they had lifted and opened and read these books. The books were worn in a way they can only get worn by hands and eyes and minds

Each family functions in their own way, by rules reinvented daily. The strangeness of each of us is somehow accommodated so that there can be such a thing as family and we can all live for some time at least in the same house. Normal is what you know.

We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling.