'Our tender, prickling, ungainly human condition beautifully shimmers from these stories' DBC PIERRE, Winner of the Booker Prize

Oddbody is a collection of ten bold and unsettling short stories that confront themes of desire, fear and shame, each one asking how far the bounds of the human form can be pushed, stretched - and subverted. A woman finds herself navigating a co-dependent relationship with a ghost. A waitress gives birth to an egg during her breakfast shift. A doctor puts his patient on a cleanse to 'purify' her mind, body and soul.

Through playful but provocative prose, Rose Keating traverses a realm both dreamlike and nightmarish, exposing - to the bone - the absurdities and horrors of the feminine experience. Oddbody prods a finger at societal norms, gleefully turns familiar tropes on their head and announces Keating as an audacious new voice in Irish fiction.

About the Author

Rose Keating is a writer from Waterford, Ireland. She studied on the Creative Writing Prose Fiction MA at UEA, where she was a recipient of the Malcolm Bradbury Scholarship and the Curtis Brown Prize. She is a winner of the Marian Keyes Young Writer Award, the Hot Press Write Here, Write Now prize and the Ted and Mary O'Regan Arts Bursary. She has been published in the Stinging Fly, Apex Magazine, Banshee and Southword. In 2022, she received an Agility Award from the Irish Arts Council.

@Rosekeating1

Reviews
Truth is stranger than fiction; this is stranger than both. Yet our tender, prickling, ungainly human condition beautifully shimmers from these stories the more surreal they get. A brilliant debut about our curious existence that would have been notable at any time in history, by an author we can expect to celebrate again -- DBC PIERRE, Winner of the Booker Prize
A spectacular debut collection, full of humour, disgust, heart and weirdness. A surrealist romp, filled with brilliantly bizarre images of the uncanny. I loved this collection, in all its gory, funny glory. Keating's ability to play with the surreal is enviable -- JODIE MATTHEWS
Adult Swim absurdism meets Lynchian uncanny in Keating's tales of transformation and transgression, in which the wry gets tangled up with the sincere. Oddbody is an oddly affecting antidote to middlebrow magical realism and all its trite allegories of modern identity. Keating's glorious, genuine offerings are weirder, wilder and far truer -- TOM BENN



Book Information
ISBN 9781837265299
Author Rose Keating
Format Paperback
Page Count 208
Imprint Canongate Books
Publisher Canongate Books