Beautiful Pictures of the Lost Homeland

‘I adored this thrillingly ambitious novel, which is intriguing, strange, yet seductive, too, in such clever and nuanced ways. A sheer pleasure to read.’ ~Joseph O'Connor

‘A pitch-perfect rendering of Dublin today and yesterday, a devastating portrait of a family in grief, and a haunting account of the past’s pull on the present. As thrilling and inventive, as it is moving and profound. A major achievement.’ ~Paul Murray

‘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.’ ~The Guardian

‘Rich in colour and broad in scope...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.’ ~Sara Baume, The Irish Times

‘It would have been easy for Gallagher to turn Geo’s story into a blockbuster bestseller about transgendered identity. However, Beautiful Pictures is more interested in the binaries and doubleness of personal identity; the many lives we all live that produce the fleeting present moment…Comparisons with Joyce are inevitable…a gripping page-turner. David Mitchell fans, for example, will easily fall under its spell.’ ~Sara Keating, Sunday Business Post Magazine

Beautiful Pictures of the Lost Homeland, is a sprawling, epic, untidy, heartbreaking masterpiece. It is a study of identity, gender, history and much more besides. Mia Gallagher is not afraid to be different and neither is her novel. ~Conor Bowman, Sunday Independent

Beautiful Pictures of the Lost Homeland is not only my favourite literary novel of the decade, it’s maybe the finest Irish novel I’ve ever read. Mia Gallagher’s shamefully unheralded book ... is oblique, dreamlike and rather wonderful ... somehow expressing an inexpressible truth at the heart of everything. Reading it is like falling into someone else’s reverie: shimmering, unknowable, spine-tingling. ~IRISH INDEPENDENT

The whole sticky mess of humanity and inhumanity is here… a massively ambitious novel… it’s hard to better. ~SUNDAY INDEPENDENT

It would have been easy for Gallagher to turn Geo’s story into a blockbuster bestseller about transgendered identity. However, Beautiful Pictures is more interested in the binaries and doubleness of personal identity; the many lives we all live that produce the fleeting present moment…Comparisons with Joyce are inevitable…a gripping page-turner. David Mitchell fans, for example, will easily fall under its spell. ~SARA KEATING, SUNDAY BUSINESS POST

Nothing came near Mia Gallagher’s Beautiful Pictures of the Lost Homeland for bravery and ambition this year ... 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. ~MIKE MCCORMACK, SUNDAY INDEPENDENT

Beautiful Pictures is no conventional door-stopper – it’s more of a portal-stopper; it’s no airport novel, it’s more a rocket launch pad novel! Everything about this book is surprising…it’s exciting and epic. ~ROSEMARY JENKINSON

Gallagher, I believe, with Beautiful Pictures of the Lost Homeland, has achieved some kind of formal evolution of the novel. ~OISÍN FAGAN, THE IRISH TIMES

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. ~BOOKMUNCH

a voluminous book, sprawling and … absorbing, digressive and endlessly surprising … its rendering is incredibly vivid … her characters are isolated and enigmatic souls … shown with a delicate intimacy. ~DUBLIN REVIEW OF BOOKS

a tightly wound story, intricately imagined and expertly told. ~BOOKS IRELAND