“The sense of possibility here, of boundary-busting and transgression, encapsulates what Gallagher does best in this blazingly intelligent, multi-level collection.”

“Trail-blazing…Unruly and difficult to pin down, these stories take a walk on the dark side…Gallagher’s flair for character evident on every page. Her language is innovative, her descriptions striking…In every story there were sentences I lingered over, savouring the newness of them. A highly accomplished and arresting collection.”

“Mia Gallagher has established herself as an experimental, highly inventive force in Irish fiction… There are sentences which dazzle you in passing, verbal cornucopias embedded in plots which confront the strange and the sad and the uncomfortable…The result is entertaining, dark, witty and constantly surprising, denying the reader even a moment to relax.”

“Shift is Gallagher’s first story collection following two novels – most recently the stupendous Beautiful Pictures of the Lost Homeland – and it’s a knockout…there’s no staleness here, no redundancy or filler, but rather a compilation of work that’s so strong it reads like the Greatest Hits of one of the best writers you’ve never yet read.”

“Rich in colour and broad in scope, and its many unruly pieces are similarly held in place by the strong voice of a central character…Gallagher’s writing is brilliant…Though somewhat baffling on the surface, Beautiful Pictures . . . is strangely coherent up close, like a magic-eye picture…a writer who doesn’t miss, or forget, a trick.”

“There is so much to say about this novel. It is sprawling, but not sloppy; messy, but not a mess. There will be as many readings of it as there are readers. Beautiful Pictures of the Lost Homeland is challenging, it is brave, it is original, it is flawed, it is moving, it is fascinating. It is art.”

“Nothing came near Mia Gallagher’s Beautiful Pictures of the Lost Homeland for bravery and ambition this year. A skillful and fearless exploration of place, time and identity – it grapples the big themes to its heart. This is the Irish novel whose reputation will grow in the coming years.  A new generation of Irish writers may well take their lead from it.”

“Mia Gallagher’s remarkable Beautiful Pictures of the Lost Homeland offers a flavour of past and potential lives. The story, which ostensibly centres on a transgendered film editor, takes the form of a montage, splicing together narratives from different periods to create a complex story about the binaries and doubleness of identity.”

“New Island have done well to snare this, but we hope a UK publisher is also on the cards, because this book needs an international audience.”

“The reader is invited into an epic in miniature, into a shocking, century-spanning, peripatetic jigsaw made of pieces of human pain that intersect and slide into one another, and the moving parts of this jigsaw, that formally coalesce in such beautiful and subtle ways, are all masterfully performed tricks to avoid the inevitable, but ever-retreating, admission of pain and loss between a daughter and her estranged father… Gallagher, I believe, with Beautiful Pictures of the Lost Homeland, has achieved some kind of formal evolution of the novel.”