"Brutal and tender, this extraordinary debut unpacks devastating loss, family dynamics, Cork’s criminal underworld, and how the smallest decisions we make dramatically impact the paths we take."
Centred on the eponymous boy who, exposed by the turmoil of grief, is pulled into Cork’s criminal underbelly, Mark Gyves’ The Boy is gritty and lyrical through its remarkable polyphonic narrative.
The book begins with a bombshell, when the Guards bring news of the death of the Boy’s mother, which sets him recollecting his early childhood: “She was beautiful then and Da loved her, he recalled. Loved the bones of her. Every fucking sinew and molecule, he knew them all”. For his part, the Boy’s father was “a handsome wild bastard.
Dangerous, funny and brilliant, with a shock of black hair atop a rogue’s ceann. Those piercing blue eyes that could stop a charging rhino dead in its fuckin’ tracks”.
Then we meet more of the Boy’s family, including his brother Fallon, who does business with The Big Fella, a man of power in “the country’s burgeoning crime scene”, and a person of “influence in political and business circles”, and his Uncle Feargal, who’s graduated from petrol bombs and riots to handguns and armed robbery. Then there’s Clifford, a wealthy landowner who runs Kilduggart Hall, a place that grimly harbours a clan of abducted boys.
In the wake of the vicious blow of another death, the Boy teeters on a tightrope as he’s woven ever tighter into a tapestry of organised crime and familial legacies, with Mark Gyves’ extraordinary writing conjuring the most dreadful, unthinkable acts and events with a brutal beauty. Weaving a powerful story of greed, grief, guilt, dark secrets, and tangled legacies, The Boy blends the propulsive energy of a crime thriller with the arresting style and emotional subtleties of literary fiction. As such, this is a novel for fans of Colin Barrett, and readers who love character-driven page-turners with layered depth.
The Boy is a powerful novel of wasted talent, loss, greed and revenge – but also of discovered genius and life-affirming friendship.
| Primary Genre | Crime and Mystery |
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The Boy is a powerful novel of wasted talent, loss, greed and revenge – but also of discovered genius and life-affirming 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.
The Boy features in the following genres: Debut Books of the Month, Debuts, Star Books, Crime and Mystery, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Historical crime and mysteries, Crime and mystery: hard-boiled crime, noir fiction
Paperback. £13.49, down from the £14.99 cover price. In Stock.
The Boy was written by Mark Gyves and published by No Exit Press an imprint of Bedford Square Publishers
£13.49, reduced from £14.99. In Stock.
