“Lake of Urine is a weird and unique gem—hilarious and eerie and oddly heartfelt, full of images and bits of language that will lodge permanently in your head.”
DAN CHAON
AUTHOR OF ILL WILL
“Enchantingly absurd and sumptuously rendered, Lake of Urine is a raucous, brazen romp through a beguilingly fantastic world. Guillermo Stitch has concocted a banquet for the senses, with surprises to savor on every page.”
MATTHEW VOLLMER
AUTHOR OF PERMANENT EXHIBIT
“A formally inventive and exhilarating romp, an absurdist marriage plot with notes of Bohumil Hrabal and a novel’s heft of singularity. Come for the exuberant prose; stay for the bawdy turns and twists, and be rewarded with laughter. This colorful, original tale will not disappoint.”
SARA LIPPMANN
AUTHOR OF DOLL PALACE
“Absolutely savage. Truly original. Absurdly funny. Stitch is Irish and it can’t help but seep through. From Swift to Wilde to Beckett, if you’re looking for them you’ll spot them. Winking. I imagine it’s in approval. The novel itself is as tight as a fist and punches twice as hard.”
ANNE CUNNINGHAM
of the IRISH INDEPENDENT
“Guillermo Stitch’s Lake of Urine reads like something Flann O’Brien might have written if he’d just allowed himself to go really wild.”
CHRISTIAN TeBORDO
AUTHOR OF GHOST ENGINE
“A strange and wonderful thing. There are sentences to relish on every page and you will find yourself wanting to read chunks of it out loud to everyone you meet.”
KATHERINE GRAHAM
THEATRE RE
Once upon a time that doesn't make a blind bit of sense, in a place that seems awfully familiar but definitely doesn't exist, Willem Seiler's obsession with measuring his world—with wrapping it up in his beloved string to keep the madness out—wreaks havoc on the Wakeling family.
Noranbole Wakeling lives in the scrub and toil of the pantry, in the ashes of the cold hearth...which, come to think of it, also sounds pretty familiar...She lives, too, in the shadow of her much wooed and cosseted sister, worshipped by the madman Seiler but overlooked by everyone else.
And that, it turns out, is a good thing.
As lives are lost to Seiler's vanity, the inattention spares her. She spots her chance to break free of the fetters that tie her to Tiny Village—and bolts.
But some cords are never really cut. In her absence, the unravelling of the world she has escaped is complete. Another madness—her mother's—reaches out to entangle her newfound Big City freedom. The unpicked quilt-work of a life in ruins threatens to ruin her own. It will be up to Noranbole to stitch it all together, into something she can call true.
"Lake of Urine" might just provide the year's literary splash. Dark and funny in equal measure, it is a sui generis romp through every fairy tale convention and literary trope you can think of—the wicked stepmother, the fairy godmother, Pinnochio, an enchanted penis, the goose that laid the golden egg, binary code, marmalade art and alcoholic meat snacks you can drink. They're all in there.
It is also a merciless take down of self and self-importance, satirising a society that exalts the inane, drowns out the sane and eschews the divine for the profane. And it is a lament for the dreadful weight of our own origins, for the heartbreaking impossibility of absolute reinvention, and the heartening tug of the ties that bind us.
