McGlue

Wonderful

Guardian

Strange and beautiful

LA Times

A gorgeously sordid story of love and murder on the high seas and in reeky corners of mid-nineteenth-century New York and points North. McGlue is a wonderwork of virtuoso prose and truths that will make you squirm and concur

Gary Lutz

You’re in safe, if sticky hands with an Ottessa Moshfegh story… Everything bulges and reeks in this novella, which feels as if it was written in a permanent state of nausea… The plot spins faster than its main character’s head. What elevates this novella are the scalpelsharp observations about McGlue’s nihilism and her prose, which is as distilled as the liquor McGlue necks. It’s a wild ride.

Fiona Wilson, The Times

Moshfegh is… a superlative short-story writer… McGlue, which owes as much to Cormac McCarthy as it does to Poe or Melville, is an entertaining curio with some lovely baroque flourishes.

Alasdair Lees, Independent

A haunting men-on-boats noir, Ottessa Moshfegh’s first work of fiction… is Moby Dick through a broken, twisted looking glass. Moshfegh writes a fascinating, ugly form of brotherhood, shot through with homophobic homoeroticism, violence and taboo. It is a pungent novella, that revels in its own foulness with a wink and a nudge… Moshfegh’s sharp, strangely textured prose makes McGlue shock in all the right ways.

Gill Moore, Totally Dublin

The mixture of brutality and tenderness was so surprising and moving to me

Patrick deWitt, Guardian