Find the best price forThe Inevitable Gift Shop

Will Eaves

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Paperback, Published in Mar 2016 by CB Editions

ISBN10: 1909585173 | ISBN13: 9781909585171

Page count: 137

Poetry Book Society Special Commendation

‘It’s like a conversation with an extraordinarily wise friend: surprising, tender, funny and profound.
– Michelle de Kretser

Subtitled ‘A memoir by other means’, The Inevitable Gift Shop lassoes consciousness, memory, desire, literature, illness, flora and fauna, problems with tortoises and cable ties, and brings them back home in double file, as prose and poetry. ‘This is now, or as good as. / We should welcome it. / There should be hats.’

‘Penetratingly clever and often quite moving and extremely charming, border-crossing uncategorisable writing ... there’s something holistic about it, in the way it enacts the absolute continuity between inner and outer life, what we feel what we think what we do.’
– Patrick McGuinness

‘It takes itself apart and puts itself back together again as it goes along like a literary Transformer, morphing from prose to poetry, literary criticism to history, every new shape a brilliant incarnation ... This is an odd book, no question, one I back to last.’
– Ian Duhig

‘Heartbreaking and hilarious.’
– Ian Sansom

‘If there were rules to writing – which there aren’t, probably – this book is rewriting them … Eaves is cutting an entirely new path, machete in hand, through bush, briar and jungle into uncharted artistic territory … It’s a book that demands to be read and re-read – and then re-read again; both front to back, back to front, and in all other manner of combinations.’
– Nothingintherulebook.com

‘… it’s a mixture of autobiographical anecdotes, poetry, micro-narratives, literary criticism and philosophical musings. In grouping these styles of writing within distinct sections, the book takes on a remarkable fluidity where different parts comment upon each other and a deeper, more complex understanding of a whole life is imaginatively constructed.
The title is a reference to a guide’s remark of a tourist site in Iceland that there is an inevitable gift shop. For me, this image took on significance throughout suggesting that parts of our lives are parcelled up and offered up, but they serve only as imitations of the real thing … an absolutely fascinating, cerebral and original book that raised so many questions for me – not just about the content of what I was reading but how I was reading it.’
– Lonesomereader.com