Michael Punke, author of The Revenant and Ridgeline * My Name is Yip accelerates into a wild gallop. The timbre of Yip's voice and the constant movement of characters through desolate landscapes creates an energy that seduces the reader. This book was described as a bold revisionist take on the American frontier novel and I don’t think there are truer words. Yip is an incredible character, up there with Owen Meany and Holden Caulfield for sheer unforgettableness. Rachel Joyce, author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry * Mute but eloquent, Yip comes thrillingly into our midst to unfurl his singular and singing book of revelations.

When they tested his reactions, he writhed and squirmed and was in obvious pain but was completely silent. Both an entertaining tale of gold, murder and the impulse for revenge, and a tender coming-of-age story amid the lawlessness of the American frontier. Later, when he encounters the Cherokee Onacona, their relationship is frustratingly short-lived: “The face of the old Indian always seemed to tell a tale I could not read … I hope he was not drove away like many.A mesmeric and rollicking adventure told by a narrator like no other - one who beguiles, moves, delights and also had me so worried for him, I was on the edge of my seat. Laird Hunt, author of Neverhome * My Name is Yip is a thrilling adventure story brim-full of humour, strangeness and charm * Ian McGuire, Booker Prize longlisted author of The North Water * A rollicking picaresque. His debut novel, My Name Is Yip, has been shortlisted for the Betty Trask, the Wilbur Smith, a South Bank Sky Arts Award and the Society of Authors First Novel Award, and longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize.

I thought I would really like this book, it checks off so many items of interest, but I couldn't feel or muster any connection to what I was reading, unfortunately. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Though it was utterly heart-breaking to watch the horrors that Yip endures, I'm so damn delighted that I chose to read this novel. Abandoned at birth by his father and raised by a seemingly distant mother, Yip is left to his own devices and assumed by most to be dumb as well as mute.One October night in the small town of Heron's Creek, Georgia, Yip Tolroy is born, the cord snaked around his fragile neck, his skin a deathly white. It’s here that Crewe’s powers of evoking landscape and character really begin to soar, with Melvillian prose full of striking unexpected phrases. Here we feel there’s something of Dickens’s orphaned heroes in Yip, a young man who tangles with society’s evils, but has the potential to come good. Parrick, he was not one to waste his words but spoke of my demise as plainly as of some turn in the weather. Short (I'm guessing 4 feet tall), completely hairless and mute, he's written off as an 'idiot' freak and not so much shunned as totally ignored.

As his mother still lies in the blood-slicked sheets, and Yip takes his first gulps of air, his father disappears without trace. Both an entertaining tale of gold, murder and the impulse for revenge, and a tender coming-of-age story amid the lawlessness of the American frontier. The characters of Dud and Yip are well crafted and I wish he would have done a little more with “Mama”. It takes a while to realise he’s been recruited into a freak show, with attractions such as the Pig Faced Lady and queasily sexualised identical twin girls the Living Dolls.A rollicking, page-turning wild west adventure, populated by a cast of arresting grotesques, with luminous imagery and an unforgettable protagonist. 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.