My Name is Yip: Shortlisted for the Betty Trask Prize

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Mute but eloquent, Yip comes thrillingly into our midst to unfurl his singular and singing book of revelations. By the time Yip reaches his fifteenth year he has not spoken a word - he is mute, friendless, an outcast. And, as Yip and Dud’s odyssey takes them further into the unknown – via travelling shows, escaped slaves and the greed of gold-hungry men – the pull of home only gets stronger.

I also felt like this story had no concept of time and I couldn’t tell how long Yip was away from home.What a marvel this novel by Paddy Crewe is, what an unlooked-for firecracker of fury and beauty and rage and hope. Yip is forced to appear in a cage, into which punters pour drink and abuse, only to be rescued once again by Dud. Lastly, what took Yip from such hopelessness to a life of serenity with the wife that was briefly mentioned? Thank you to the publishers for this review copy, now it is a western - so it's not really my go to read, but this is very well written debut. The story moves briskly, thanks to very short chapters with concise and perfect titles and a plot that barrels along and really picks up speed at the end, taking your heart with it.

My Name Is Yip is a tremendous novel, one that both harks back and burns the way forward, that is built of sentences that sing and roar. The images still flowing through my mind as if it were a movie I'd just finished watching, i felt every bit invested in the journey of Yip Tolroy that when it came to an end i really felt it, I'm sad there's no more pages to turn.I found it reminiscent of Sebastian Barry' s excellent A Thousand Moons, with its distinctive narrative style and eccentric main characters from outside the social norms. Though steeped in backwoods dialect and lacking in grammar, punctuation, and syntax, the narrator weaves a literary gem. It was very action packed and moved on quickly - I sometimes wished parts had lasted a little longer, for example when Yip meets an escaped slave ‘Solus’ who takes him prisoner. If you are to mark your permanence and have yourself heard in this world, then there is only one way to do it. The witting is humorous, self-deprecating and captures the essence of the early and difficult life in this country.

I’m a huge lover of historical fiction and the Midwest has to be one of my fave time periods so I enjoyed being thrown back into it. The bar is high when it comes to coming of age westerns, and despite a different and appealing protagonist narrator, 14 year old Yip, this falls way short. Clare Clark, author of Savage Lands * What a marvel this novel by Paddy Crewe is, what an unlooked-for firecracker of fury and beauty and rage and hope. The timbre of Yip's voice and the constant movement of characters through desolate landscapes creates an energy that seduces the reader. Together, they embark on a journey that thrusts them unwittingly into a world of menace and violence, of lust and revenge.The American Mid West, October 1815, and Yip Tolroy announces his entry into the world in complete silence, with a cord wrapped around his tiny neck. It is almost unique in the way the story is told (through the words of a fourteen year old mute) but is beautifully told in nineteenth century Georgia dialect.