AN IRISH TIMES DEBUT AUTHOR TO LOOK OUT FOR 2025
'Joyously diabolic' CAMILLA GRUDOVA
‘Dark and sumptuous and unapologetically peculiar’ LISA McINERNEY
'Marvellously unnerving' ERIC LaROCCA
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.
Genre: Literary Fiction
'Joyously diabolic' CAMILLA GRUDOVA
‘Dark and sumptuous and unapologetically peculiar’ LISA McINERNEY
'Marvellously unnerving' ERIC LaROCCA
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.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"There's an impish playfulness and a deeply potent blight spreading from each story collected in Rose Keating's marvelously unnerving Oddbody. This superior collection of short fiction revels in the absurdity of human and non-human existence, gleefully celebrates the power of the uncanny, the atrocious and the bizarre... one of the most audacious and thought provoking collections I've ever read." - Eric LaRocca
"Oddbody is a compendium of the contemporary female experience, red in tooth and claw. Rose Keating writes as if armed with a diamond blade; her stories are visceral, surreal, and savagely good." - Mary Morrissy
"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, and in a relatable everyday way. 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." - D B C Pierre
"This is weird girl fiction at its finest - an uneasy, bold and subversive collection of astonishing tales that left me hungry for more. With Rose Keating, we are witnessing the birth of a rare and precious talent in literature." - Lucy Rose
"Oddbody is a compendium of the contemporary female experience, red in tooth and claw. Rose Keating writes as if armed with a diamond blade; her stories are visceral, surreal, and savagely good." - Mary Morrissy
"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, and in a relatable everyday way. 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." - D B C Pierre
"This is weird girl fiction at its finest - an uneasy, bold and subversive collection of astonishing tales that left me hungry for more. With Rose Keating, we are witnessing the birth of a rare and precious talent in literature." - Lucy Rose
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