Her first novel to appear in print was A Swift Pure Cry (2006), a troubling tale, based on events in Ireland in the early 1980s, in which a 15-year-old girl, Shell, struggles to survive in a world of poverty, alcoholism, teenage pregnancy and moral hypocrisy.
In her childhood room, she felt like a ghost revisiting the life of a dead girl whose shell of a body she had once inhabited.
While I can say I've never been a you-go-girl utterer, I did spend years cultivating a tough, no-nonsense, you-go-girl outer shell that did a fairly good job of shielding me from idiots, but also made me act like a jerk.
She frowned under the downpour, looking chilled with a bare midriff and no shoes, as she glanced nervously at the girl with shells and starfish netted in a four-foot-high headdress.
I watched the girls collect shells and dig another hole, which the beach attendant soon enough refilled with his rake.
Pictures the girls drew, shells they picked up at the beach, the last drops of a perfumed shower gel.
Biff and Chipper much prefer having adventures with their Gran, a game old girl in a shell suit; their Asian friend, Nadim; and their black friends, Wilf and Wilma.
But, inexplicably, Mr Baricco sandwiches Gould and his failure between digressions on sport (mostly boxing) and interminable fantasies about cowboys and Indians by Gould's platonic girl friend, Shatzy Shell, who has clearly seen too many Sergio Leone films.
In this début collection of stories, a woman comes back from the dead, to the consternation of her daughter, and a Nigerian man reluctantly turns over custody of his teen-age daughter to his wife, who lives in the U.S., only to watch, via weekly Skype calls, as the girl becomes a shell of herself.
Many of the victims were old men, women, and children, including a young boy who had picked up a cluster bomb that blew off his hands, and a nine-year-old girl hit by shell fragments, whose intestines dangled from her body.
As much as any fantasy sequence, that gesture reveals the girl inside the shell.
