Shortlisted for the Independent Booksellers Book Award 2011.
Featured on The Book Show on Sky Arts on 19 May 2011.
Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2010.
If you took The History Boys by Alan Bennett, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess plus any of the Wilt books by Tom Sharpe and threw them at the wall so hard that their pages ripped and flapped to the floor in one chaotic heap, then you might find this book. If you found the exercise fun and funny, then this is a definite read for you.
Idiosyncratic, irreverent, witty, playful, amusing, aggressive, insightful, original - this is a book that is hard to define but, at the same time, to which we can all relate.
Ruprecht Van Doren is an overweight genius whose hobbies include very difficult maths and the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Daniel 'Skippy' Juster is his roommate. In the grand old Dublin institution that is Seabrook College for Boys, nobody pays either of them much attention. But when Skippy falls for Lori, the frisbee-playing Siren from the girls' school next door, suddenly all kinds of people take an interest - including Carl, part-time drug-dealer and official school psychopath ...A tragic comedy of epic sweep and dimension, Skippy Dies scours the corners of the human heart and wrings every drop of pathos, humour and hopelessness out of life, love, Robert Graves, mermaids, M-theory, and everything in between.
Paul Murray was born in 1975. He studied English literature at Trinity College in Dublin. He has a Masters degree in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. Paul was a former bookseller and his first novel, An Evening of Long Goodbyes, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize in 2003 and was nominated for the Kerry Irish Fiction Award.
