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KIT
Kit is a story of the sumptuous complication - and precariousness - of life and relationships. It describes a call to intimacy in a state of emergency. It is a story of one life disrupted as another moves toward its end.
'Kit is built of notes and poem-pieces, scenes towards a troubled theory of How We Hurt Now, but it has more completeness than many a much longer book. In both its open-throated exclamations and its concentrated meditations on myriad forms of pain and joy, it is searching for a loving root system and finds it in the losses we don't always afford one-another a language for. It finds it in children and strangers, in arguments and text messages. In hindsight and in hope. It finds it working away beautifully in our every day wreckages. Kit reaches places other books don't. It's a beauty.'- Max Porter
'A startlingly original book that burns with love and grief. Kit is a masterpiece: I have never read anything like it.' - Antonia Bolingbroke Kent
'Kit is love and pain distilled: a book of extraordinary force. It left me reeling for days.' - Tom Bullough
'This beautiful, unflinching book asks us what it might mean to truly confront loss – its shame, its intimacies, its clarifying horrors, the ways it forces us to relearn how to live.' - Keiran Goddard
'Megan Barker's Kit is a timeless classic, the language is compelling and succinct, there is tenderness captured in here and a fierce heart too. This book is so exquisite and so daring - I loved every page.' - Salena Godden
Megan Barker has created a classic: something of incredible beauty and rarity, glittering with significance and love.' - Jay Griffiths
'Totally wonderful. Shimmering and tender and brutal all at once. I devoured it, needed more, came out the other side different. A forensic archeology of the sweaty reeking agonies of different kinds of love - maternal, sexual, something else - held up against the everyday world of things. Lightbulbs, emojis, childrens' school projects are at once hilariously mundane and imbued with sacred magic. Megan Barker makes words dance for her in ways other people can't.' - Kirstin Innes
'Stopped me in my tracks... Unlike anything else - defiantly original in the way it hybridises form. The writing is brave enough to justify that. It’s right on the edge, but instinctive, tender and searing. There were times I had to stop and take a breath, not only after some of the emotional body hits (sometimes tiny moments), but often at the honest, simple, day-to-day impossibly complicated love that is at the absolute heart of the piece. It’s a cry, and a demand, and it’s brashly beautiful. Without doubt this isn't a safe book. Some readers just won't connect. But those that do will be flattened.' – Cynan Jones
‘Usually I try to inhabit a book when I read it, but I found that KIT inhabited me. It was with me at all hours of the day and night and in all weathers, subtly altering the way I experience the world. If you read it and trust it, the same will happen to you.’ - Ian McMillan
'Beyond beautiful, this book is just devastating and true, and like real dream music, with such dazzling moments of illumination. I feel so much richer in spirit for having had the privilege of absorbing it. A thing of real beauty.' - Alexi Murdoch
‘Extraordinary ... It is a “poultice of words” – something that brings feeling to the surface. It bears witness to death, and how the living live with it.’ – Pádraig Ó Tuama
'If I put it down for a moment on almost every page it was only to steady myself, or to savour, or marvel, and occasionally (thank God) to laugh. I can't wait to read it again.' - Sue Peebles
'This book is magnificent, unclassifiable, heart piercing, ferociously itself. Under Megan's care, language is turned loose out into the wild where it thrives, grows new limbs and comes home covered in the raw, truest stuff of life.' - Richard Reed Parry
'An extraordinary experience - the richness, rhythm and power of the language pulls you in, down and along. Megan's voice is totally unique, ethereal yet completely relatable and grounded. It's a mirror to a female existence. You feel deeply connected to the narrator's journey but it's also a challenging piece. Completely invigorating. It is work like this and voices like Megan's that we have to fight for.'
A pageturner of the most profound, magical kind, full of phrases and rhythms that get under your skin. At turns passionate, funny, full-blooded and desperately sad, KIT captures parenthood, friendship, relationships, depression and love in ways that felt so true, so direct, they left me breathless. - Jude Rogers
'Kit is both a controlled cry of anguish and a defiant roar of love. It faces down the devastation and helplessness of bereavement, yet somehow bursts with life. It's mesmerising.'– James Scudamore
‘A lyrical kaleidoscope that builds to a moving study of family, friendship, desire and the great distances that can open between us, in even the most intimate of spaces. Kit marks the arrival of an exciting new voice navigating with nuance and a lightness of touch the fertile territories along the shared borders of fiction, memoir and poetry.' - Owen Sheers