When his fiancé breaks off their engagement, Patrick Oxtoby leaves home and moves into a boarding house in a remote seaside town. But in spite of his hopes and determination to build a better life, nothing goes to plan and Patrick is soon driven to take a desperate and chilling course of action.
This is How is a mesmerising and meticulously drawn portrait of a man whose unease in the world leads to his tragic undoing. With breathtaking wisdom and an astute insight into the human mind, award-winning M.J. Hyland’s new book is a masterpiece that inspires horror and sympathy in equal measure.
Subtle and richly exploratory.
The description of life on the inside is as remarkable for its authenticity as it is for the development of Patrick's character. Alongside the relentless hopelessness, the struggle for existence itself and the constant undertow of mindless violence, there are some moments of extreme tenderness which bring tears to your eyes.
A visceral, deeply affecting tale ... Hyland beautifully and devastatingly depicts her sympathetic anti-hero's painful cravings for closeness. This is a compassionate, disturbing novel, tragically showing a human learning to appreciate life only when his own has been incarcerated.
Anita Sethi, IndependentAn extraordinary study of a skewed, complex character ... This is How confirms [Hyland] as a true virtuoso of such immersive writing.
Holly Kyte, Sunday TelegraphRigorous realism.
GuardianA novel of extraordinary power. Bleak yet moving, mercilessly dispassionate yet shot through with kindness and wit, it is a profound achievement.
Justine Jordan, GuardianImpeccable and chilling ... White-hot prose.
Julie Meyerson, Financial TimesMJ Hyland is a uniquely talented writer ... Patrick Oxtoby is young, complex, gauche, mystifying and unlikeable, and yet you find yourself half-hoping he'll get away with murder.
Justine McCarthy, Irish TribuneIn This Is How Hyland has stripped away the relationships that Carry Me Down explores and put her unstable protagonist in a world without anyone he knows. It's a frightening idea, and with no one biased in his favour and no one to notice signs of distress, Oxtoby's deterioration is rapid ... Every conversation he has is strained and Hyland's well pitched dialogue cranks up the tension mercilessly.
Molly Guinness, SpectatorHyland's exquisitely crafted prose makes readers care for this emotionally disjointed protagonist.
Angel Gurria-Quintana, Financial TimesFrom the first pages the laconic first-person narrative is full of tension ... Hyland's focus is steady, her detail relentless. The novel becomes deeply moving, not because there is any special pleading for Oxtoby but because it stays with a devastated man in all his weakness ... This is an expertly paced, gripping novel that doesn't falter and never compromises its emotional truth
Helen Dunmore, The TimesPatrick's discomfort is reflected in Hyland's terse, unadorned prose, choppy with one-sentence paragraphs that isolate each event from the next, just as Patrick is cut off from his own response to them.
Rachel Aspden, ObserverEffective and compelling.
Lesley McDowell, Sunday HeraldDarkly, 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 SupplementA vividly imagined novel ... Every word of Hyland's narrative - observed with the bright, deranged precision of a Richard Dadd painting - resonates with Patrick's tragic awareness of what he lacks.
Jane Shilling, Daily TelegraphHyland's first two novels displayed a talent to delve into darkness. Her riveting follow-up, This Is How, its title as cryptic as the murderer Patrick Oxtoby who possesses its haunted pages, is her finest novel yet.
Tom Adair, ScotsmanHyland creates a suffocating bubble of inevitability through the meticulous psychological make-up of Patrick ... The writing feels devoid of both action and emotion, and is painstakingly pedestrian in its present-tense observations, but as with Kafka and Camus, that in itself creates the effect of how grindingly bleak life can be ... It's a chilling study of society, the disaffected and the concept of justice.
Irish IndependentA tour de force. Hyland illuminates this man's damaged soul with such a steely, brilliant clarity that your heart breaks for him.
HELEN GARNERM.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
