how to gut a fish
“This collection of eleven stories is, from first to last, poised, distinctive and excellent”
― The Irish Times
“Assured, impressive. Armstrong has a talent for disrupting our expectations and her prose is sensorily rich. Her evocations of landscape are extraordinary”
― The Guardian
“Armstrong’s collection of potent short stories is a testament to the mechanics of good writing. It is written in the kind of graceful, deliberate prose that makes you take your time”
― RTÉ
“She has a remarkable ability to beguile as she totally unsettles you”
― The Times
“Gob-smackingly good. Armstrong combines disturbing themes with humane characters and beguiling prose”
― The Irish Examiner
“A beautiful and disquieting collection of stories that will implant themselves and continue to grow in the reader’s mind long after the reading is done. She is an extraordinarily assured writer”
― The Sunday Independent
“Uneasy, elegant. Armstrong delights in these contrasts, a delicious off-kilter sensibility that is spun out in silky prose and a startling turn of phrase. Weirdly wonderful”
― The Daily Mail
“Armstrong's stories are rich with description, sight and sounds, textures and scents. Disquieting material, equanimous prose; in combining the two, Armstrong's stories have a sinister finesse”
― The Sunday Telegraph
“Such is Armstrong’s command over language that her phrases often hit like a shock of cold water … a great example of how malleable and muscular the short story can be, and of a writer who is confident and proficient enough to push at its edges, opening up something fresh, distinctive, unique”
― The Irish Independent
falling animals
“Falling Animals is a heartbreaking, salt-drenched book about letting go — of the mistakes we have made and the chances we have missed; of all the answers we may never know”
― The Irish Independent
“You will smell the tide and the seaweed, feel the Atlantic breeze on your cheeks, and hear the crunch of the shingle on the beach as you dive ever deeper into Sheila Armstrong’s beautiful, earthy debut novel … Armstrong’s sumptuous prose makes us slow down to wallow in the waves – to linger with these people”
― The Sunday Independent
“Armstrong's writing is as fresh and bracing as the salt-spattered breeze … she imbues their stories with both dignity and beauty.”
― The Telegraph
“Armstrong's prose is as invigorating and restless as the sea itself … it movingly suggests that the lives of all its lonely characters are, to some extent, as unknowable from the outside as that of the dead man himself”
― Daily Mail
“Falling Animals heralds the arrival of a unique literary talent. Every beautifully crafted sentence brings the characters to life, and the story and atmosphere created by Armstrong live long after the last words are read”
― Business Post
“An absolutely beautiful debut … Falling Animals is remarkable not only in how Armstrong constructs such a range of complete lives in relatively short chapters but how these stories of often far-flung and unconnected individuals meld into a coherent and utterly absorbing whole”
― The New European
“A compelling, engrossing read that will grab its readers with two hands, and leave them back where they started, but not quite the same as they once were”
― Books Ireland
“Falling Animals is staggeringly beautiful, both inside and out, with a most striking cover, a work of art in its own right. It is a novel of rare artistry and elegance, a really unique and sublime experience”
― Writing.ie