A story is best if there is something ancient and inexplicable embedded in it. Here is a bog, ancient animal and human remains, archaeologists and their people, and time. The Red Mouth is rich in sentences filled with electric barbwire. Sheila Armstrong is a virtuoso stylist who handles words with Nabokovian surety. Her sentences are like paintings, Irish words caught in the net of her remarkable imagery like migrating birds. When the book-burners knock on your door this is one to hide in the flour barrel

ANNIE PROULX, author of Brokeback Mountain

Songlike in its beauty, The Red Mouth feels almost primordial, as if it has always existed. A work of uncanny power and great depth

LOUISE KENNEDY, author of Trespasses

Sheila Armstrong writes about landscapes and their communities with rare delicacy and warmth, and with a gift for the unspoken rooted in the best stories of quiet people. I'll read almost anything in sentences so finely made

SARAH MOSS, author of Ghost Wall

Reading Sheila Armstrong is like reading Claire Keegan or Donal Ryan for the first time. A writer already touched by greatness

JOSEPH O'CONNOR, author of My Father's House

The beautifully occulted nature of the world is laid bare in Sheila Armstrong's extraordinary The Red Mouth. Readers will be enthralled and taken deep into the depths of this mesmerizing novel

JEFF VANDERMEER, author of The Southern Reach Trilogy

An absolute tour de force of language, The Red Mouth pulses with beauty, insight and mounting dread. Sheila Armstrong is one of the most powerful writers at work today - she delves unflinchingly into the treasures and terrors that dwell beneath all our ordinary and extraordinary lives. This novel is a remarkable artistic achievement

COLIN WALSH, author of Kala