Publisher's description. A genre-bending work of literary reportage. The profound and the absurd come face to face in this extraordinary auto-fiction exposé, as a bookish young woman stumbles across the bizarre underworld of professional cage fighting. Unexpectedly hooked on the spectacle, she befriends fighters and chases fights, becoming ever more entangled in the macabre, blackly comic and ultimately heart-breaking drama of the octagon.

Compulsively readable

Truly gripping, stunning

Mesmerising

An exciting brand of nonfiction depicting the darker side of the American dream. An intimate, front-row look at two stories of hope, glory, and violence

Best book I read this year

Nothing else felt as strong and smart and fresh and honest this year - nothing else whipped my head around the way something great and truly new does

An intelligent, funny, and utterly captivating look at a surprising subculture

Thrown does what all literature aspires to do - to bring us into a community, a universe, we did not know we cared about and in the end leave us shattered and revealed

The most fascinating book I've read this year. The precision of Howley's prose reminds me of Joan Didion or David Foster Wallace

The fight book of our generation has landed. Thrown is a fantastic debut

A poetic portrait of a bloody American subculture, and a knockout of a nonfiction debut

As dark and funny as anything I have read this year

Kerry Howley embarks on a quest for ecstasy delivered in an unexpected forum: MMA fights. This transfixing nonfiction narrative combines bloody play-by-play with philosophical inquiry, delivering serious punches. Welcome to the Octagon

Beautiful. It’s refreshing to read a piece of place-writing that digs so deeply and tenderly into a marginal landscape, and which (strikingly) does so using a novelist’s tools as well as a nature writer’s.

Cowen's relationship with this morsel of land is intense and honest, and described in superb prose... Not only rich and strange, but also astonishing.

When Cowen thinks of himself as an owl or a butterfly or a fox caught in a snare the book lights up... leaping over the space between animal and human as though there were no difference between us.

Cowen is without doubt one of our best current writers on landscape, on a par with Roger Deakin, Richard Mabey and Robert MacFarlane

Wonderful … An eerie haunting book … rendered with hair-raising, almost hallucinogenic, lyricism. Cowen moves on through the seasons of the year and the creatures of the edge land, feeling, more than observing, how the improving circumstances of animal life mirror his own climb out of darkness.

Blending natural history with a novelistic approach, Cowen revives his connection to the evocative, mysterious power of the natural world.

A luminous nature book

Very beautiful indeed... [Cowen] has all the alliterative grace and fresh metaphors of a poet

[A] poetic memoir... This apparently scrappy and overlooked piece of wasteland - a tangle of wood, meadow, field and river - proves to be, under [Cowen's] forensic and magnifying gaze, brimming with riches.

He is engrossed by his landscape, enthralled by the minutiae and evokes the same fascination in the reader