Oddbody

'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.

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, author of THE LAMB
Brutal, beautiful, bloodthirsty. Rose Keating writes with the vivid grace of a poet and the clear-eyed insight of someone who knows a ghost or two. One of the most memorable debuts I've read in a long time -- KIRSTY LOGAN
Rib tickling and joyously diabolic, this book breathes a new and invigorating life into Irish literature -- CAMILLA GRUDOVA
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. This is an ambitiously written and gorgeously imaginative collection penned by a brave new voice in literature with a very bright future ahead. Oddbody is one of the most audacious and thought provoking collections I've ever read -- ERIC LaROCCA
Here's a collection from a writer defined by great curiosity and compassion. These stories are dark and sumptuous and unapologetically peculiar -- LISA McINERNEY
Playful, brutal and disgustingly readable. Rose Keating is truly one to watch -- HEATHER PARRY
In these unflinching stories, Keating builds a macabre world in which her characters are utterly free even within their various compulsions, constraints and grotesque circumstances. Compassionate, gross, deeply compelling. A must-read Kirkus 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
Exquisitely grotesque, the stories in Oddbody shake us both viscerally and psychologically. The best kind of short fiction that dissects and punctures reality as we know it -- YAN GE
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

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

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