THE BOY is a novel of wasted talent, loss, greed and revenge – but also of discovered genius and joyous friendship.
By turns terrifying, taut, humane and tender it tells the origin story of Ireland’s organised-crime epidemic with a skill and grace which belies a debut novel, and is the calling-card of a ringing new voice in Irish fiction.
When the Guards knock on the door the Boy already knows his mother is dead.His father flees to the pub, leaving him to wait alone. Soon his brother Fallon, half-protector and half-outlaw, draws him into a world where grief and crime are rarely separated. At the same time, a wealthy landowner harbours grotesque secrets in the countryside - a hidden “family” of abducted boys, a nightmare lurking beneath respectability.
As the Boy moves through these fractured worlds - his father’s guilt, his uncle’s paramilitary past, his brother’s violent death - he becomes both witness and inheritor of a brutal legacy.
Think of a space where the layered complexity of Tana French meets the whip-smart dialogue and brutal beauty of Colin Barrett and the sharp tenderness and humour of Graeme Armstrong’s The Young Team – and you’re somewhere near where this novel will take you.
| ISBN: | 9781835015810 |
| Publication date: | 8th October 2026 |
| Author: | Mark Gyves |
| Publisher: | No Exit Press an imprint of Bedford Square Publishers |
| Format: | Paperback |
| Primary Genre | Crime and Mystery |
| Other Genres: |
THE BOY is a novel of wasted talent, loss, greed and revenge – but also of discovered genius and joyous friendship.
By turns terrifying, taut, humane and tender it tells the origin story of Ireland’s organised-crime epidemic with a skill and grace which belies a debut novel, and is the calling-card of a ringing new voice in Irish fiction.
When the Guards knock on the door the Boy already knows his mother is dead.His father flees to the pub, leaving him to wait alone. Soon his brother Fallon, half-protector and half-outlaw, draws him into a world where grief and crime are rarely separated. At the same time, a wealthy landowner harbours grotesque secrets in the countryside - a hidden “family” of abducted boys, a nightmare lurking beneath respectability.
As the Boy moves through these fractured worlds - his father’s guilt, his uncle’s paramilitary past, his brother’s violent death - he becomes both witness and inheritor of a brutal legacy.
Think of a space where the layered complexity of Tana French meets the whip-smart dialogue and brutal beauty of Colin Barrett and the sharp tenderness and humour of Graeme Armstrong’s The Young Team – and you’re somewhere near where this novel will take you.
The Boy features in the following genres: Crime and Mystery, Historical Fiction, Historical crime and mysteries, Crime and mystery: hard-boiled crime, noir fiction
The Boy is available in Paperback
The Boy was written by Mark Gyves and published by No Exit Press an imprint of Bedford Square Publishers
£13.49
