Review
'"Animals" is both a very funny and surprising inspection of the detail of modern life, and an affecting prortait of a man trying to make sense of it.' Independent on Sunday '!the almost stream of consciousness deluge of paranoia and urban myth made real that constitute his recollection of these events is darkly, grimly hilarious!deeply unsettling but utterly absorbing.' Metro 'It's a measure of Keith Ridgway's stylistic gift that with so little concrete action he manages to sustain a mood of brooding anticipation throughout. The first chapter is one of the most head-tighteningly suspenseful pieces of writing I've read in years!Like Beckett, Ridgeway knows the humour in pathos and the pathos in humour!it haunts the reader, insisting that he thinks a little more, be a little more cautious, look a little deeper. To read it, in fact, is to find oneself a little more naked in the world.' Daily Telegraph 'He turns people inside out, detailing their quirks and vulnerabilities with engaging perceptiveness!a concatenation of anecdotes and dream revelations!unnerving in their odd accuracy.' The Times '!a bold attempt to convey the fluctuations of a damaged mind.' Guardian 'Showing the disintegration of a subject is not an easy task but Ridgway pulls it off. This is not an easy or comforting read but, surrounded by ease and comfort as we are, it is all the more crucial for that.' The Scotsman 'Showing the disintegration of a subject is not an easy task but Ridgeway pulls it off. This is not an easy or comforting read, but surrounded by ease and comfort as we are, it is all the more crucial for that.' Sunday Tribune 'Only the strongest writer can carry off this daring examination of emptiness at the heart of our global society. Animals is funny, grotesque, absurdly powerful and unsettling, like walking across a room full of trapdoors.' Hugo Hamilton, author of "The Speckled People" Praise for Ridgway: The pleasure this brings is the pleasure of the discovery of a writer whose gifts run deep... His is a multi-faceted talent bursting with writerly intuition and intelligence. The finest debut novel I've read in years.' Scotland on Sunday 'A powerful exposure of the new, reforming, optimistic Irish!In this, it echoes the work to which it recurringly refers, offering an updating of Joyce's penetrating gaze, in The Dead, on the relation between the educated, bourgeois, cosmopolite 'second city of empire' and the stark suffering that lies in that city's barren and insular hinterland.' TLS
5 star review, Metro
'darkly, grimly hilarious...deeply unsettling but utterly absorbing.
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.