Available as eBook, Paperback
The brilliant new novel from the author of the Man-Booker-shortlisted Carry Me Down
All actions have consequences. This is how life goes.
Patrick is a loner, an intelligent but disturbed young man struggling to find his place in the world. He ventures out on his own, and, as he begins to find happiness, he commits an act of violence that sends his life horribly and irreversibly out of control. But should a person’s life be judged by a single bad act?
This is How is a compelling and macabre journey into the dark side of human existence and a powerful meditation on the nature of guilt and redemption
“Darkly, sparsely, and with sustained intensity, Hyland constructs the montage of a killer … a dash of Camus’s Meursault is added to the pathology … She writes intelligently about her subject’s growing institutionalization, his bafflement growing into boredom then safety as Patrick gradually finds a kind of happiness inside … From within these shady borderlands Hyland has produced a memorable study.”
Toby Lichtig
times Literary Supplement
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“A novel of extraordinary power…Hyland tells her story in a supercharged present tense, tremblingly aware of physical detail. … it is a profound achievement”
guardian
“M.J. Hyland has a ferocious imagination, and an eerie way of squeezing the distance between author, character and reader, so that the atmosphere of the book soaks and penetrates the reader’s mind. When you’ve been reading Hyland, other writers seem to lack integrity; they seem wedded to weak confabulations, whereas she aims straight for the truth and the heart.”
Hilary Mantel
“A tour de force. Hyland illuminates this man’s damaged soul with such a steely, brilliant clarity that your heart breaks for him.”
Helen Garner
“Three or four days [after finishing the novel], Hyland’s white-hot prose was still smouldering in my head and I found myself intensely, almost helplessly, moved by Oxtoby and his tragedy”
financial Times
M.J. Hyland
M.J Hyland is an ex-lawyer and the author of three multi-award-winning novels: How the Light Gets In (2004), Carry Me Down (2006) and This is How (2009). Carry Me Down (2006) was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won both the Hawthornden Prize and the Encore Prize. M.J Hyland has twice been longlisted for the Orange Prize (2004 and 2009), the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (2004 and 2007) and This is How (2009) was also longlisted for the Dublin International IMPAC prize.
M.J Hyland is also a lecturer in Creative Writing in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester where she runs fiction workshops, alongside Martin Amis (2007-2010), Colm Tóibín (2010-2011) and Jeanette Winterson (2013 - ). M.J Hyland also runs regular Fiction Masterclasses in the Guardian Masterclass Programme, and has twice been shortlisted for the BBC Short Story Prize (2011 and 2012). She also publishes in the Guardian ‘How to Write’ series, and has written nonfiction for the Financial Times, Granta, the New Yorker and elsewhere. M.J Hyland is also co-founder of the Hyland & Byrne Editing Firm (see - www.editingfirm & www.mjhyland.com)