Award-Winning Author Claire Kilroy in Conversation

ABOUT SOLDIER SAILOR

In Soldier Sailor, her first novel for over a decade, Claire Kilroy takes us deep into the early days of motherhood. Exploring the clash of fierce love for a new life with a seismic change in identity, Kilroy vividly realises the raw, tumultuous emotions of a new mother, as her marriage strains and she struggles with questions of love, autonomy and creativity.

As she smiles at her baby, Sailor, while mentally composing her own suicide note, an old friend makes a welcome return – but can he really offer a lifeline to the woman she used to be?

Use THIS LINK to buy Solder Sailor directly from Claire’s Publisher Faber & Faber.

The ICC will also be selling books at this Literary Event.

SOLDIER SAILOR BY CLAIRE KILROY RECEIVES RAVE REVIEWS

What Authors are saying about Kilroy’s ‘Soldier Sailor’

“Every woman on earth will identify with this book. Every man will learn something urgent to his betterment. It sings with great authority about the wretched entrapment and molecular joy of motherhood, doing for Irish Prose what Eavan Boland did for poetry. A radiant and fearless work of universal import”.  – SEBASTIAN BARRY

“Breath-taking: the high voltage novel about motherhood that Plath might have written, line after line singing with it’s own electrical current”  – LUCY CALDWELL

“Compelling, mundane and funny, Soldier Sailor is about the life and death business of being-a-mother and it is a huge, small book. I kept having flashbacks. This is a scorching read. I could not put it down.” – ANNE ENRIGHT

What The Press Say about Claire Kilroy’s ‘Soldier Sailor’

The Sunday Times Literary Editor Johanna Thomas-Corr called the novel “Brilliant, brutally honest, very funny. . . certainly one of the finest novels published this year.”

The Guardian has praised Soldier Sailor as “a whole body experience” and said the novel locates Kilroy “among the ranks of motherhood’s laureates alongside the likes of Helen Simpson, Rachel Cusk and Sarah Moss”. 

The Irish Independent said “in this searing examination of the toll motherhood can take on a woman, Claire Kilroy joins the illustrious company of authors like Anne Enright and Elizabeth Strout.”

The Irish Times dubbed the novel “a beauty”, calling it “exceptional. . . with mordant wit and acute, astute observations”. 

A review in The Times called Soldier Sailor “exceptionally good… it sizzles and crackles with life”, describing the novel as “a white-knuckle ride you can’t get off – just like parenthood.”

Anthony Cummins in The Daily Mail called the novel “dark and intense, as well as richly comic”, going on to say “It’s terrifically well done – and if I had to predict what might end up on this year’s Booker longlist, I’d say place your bets”.

In a wonderful review, the Financial Times wrote: “Soldier Sailor is a fully realised depiction of love, hate, despair and hope, conveyed in prose of mesmerising vitality, richly layered with myth and fairy-tale, the tragic and the comedic. Passionately rendered, searingly honest, Kilroy succeeds in articulating both the profound and commonplace reality of this mother of all rites of passage.”

As Said on ‘FRONT ROW’,  ‘My favourite book I’ve read this year’ PANDORA SYKES

What Readers Say About ‘Soldier Sailor’:

***** ‘About as perfect a piece of writing as you’ll find.’

***** ‘An entirely different voltage to anything I’ve read … she somehow manages to verbalise *exactly* the feelings and thoughts I certainly had, at points when I was a young mother’

***** ‘This story touched me on such a visceral level.’

***** ‘I was held captive by this novel … an utterly absorbing depiction of motherhood’

***** ‘I loved this book. Any woman, with or without children, will see themselves mirrored in this narrative’

***** ‘An excellent, interesting and rather unforgettable creation.’