A novel about guilt, rage, imagination, and boyhood, about being lost in the dark and learning you�����re not alone
This is the story of a few strange hours in the life of a troubled teenage boy.
You mustn’t do that to yourself Shy. You mustn’t hurt yourself like that.
He is wandering into the night listening to the voices in his head: his teachers, his parents, the people he has hurt and the people who are trying to love him.
Got your special meds, nutcase?
He is escaping Last Chance, a home for “very disturbed young men,” and walking into the haunted space between his night terrors, his past, and the heavy question of his future.
The night is huge and it hurts.
In Shy, Max Porter extends the excavation of boyhood that began with GriefIs the Thing with Feathers and continued with Lanny. But here he asks: How does mischievous wonder and anarchic energy curdle into something more disturbing and violent? Shy is a bravura, lyric, music-besotted performance by one of the great writers of his generation.
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Genre: Literary Fiction
This is the story of a few strange hours in the life of a troubled teenage boy.
You mustn’t do that to yourself Shy. You mustn’t hurt yourself like that.
He is wandering into the night listening to the voices in his head: his teachers, his parents, the people he has hurt and the people who are trying to love him.
Got your special meds, nutcase?
He is escaping Last Chance, a home for “very disturbed young men,” and walking into the haunted space between his night terrors, his past, and the heavy question of his future.
The night is huge and it hurts.
In Shy, Max Porter extends the excavation of boyhood that began with GriefIs the Thing with Feathers and continued with Lanny. But here he asks: How does mischievous wonder and anarchic energy curdle into something more disturbing and violent? Shy is a bravura, lyric, music-besotted performance by one of the great writers of his generation.
EditBuild
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"Living poetry-prose, pulsative, growing, coming of age, borderless in its thinking, boundaryless in its approach, a sonorous document that pulses with lived experience." - Rachael Allen
"A troubled boy's psyche is presented in a shattered mosaic that contains within it the hope of new forms and new beginnings - this is a beautiful and haunting book, and it captures with a great artistry the resonance and rhythms of its era." - Kevin Barry
"The troubled boy at the heart of this novel is full of rage and sadness but Max Porter finds tenderness and hope in him. Just beautiful." - Mariana Enríquez
"There is no other writer quite like him, is there? His consistent ability to control the intersection of form and content, his precision, inventiveness, stylistic radiance and heart. The way Max reveals Shy's fragility without so much as a hint of sentimentality is masterful. It's a book that pushes back against the reductive nature of the now ubiquitous 'trauma plot' and, in doing so, more deeply honours the complexity of its subject." - Nathan Filer
"Shy is intensely vivid, dark and provocative. Max Porter's writing so striking, rich and evocative. Shy broke my heart and I loved him for it." - Salena Godden
"Max Porter excavates through the mess and tumult of life and of a mind, leaving us with the sharp clarity of poetry, and an emotional core of tender, beautiful prose." - Samantha Harvey
"Shy is the strangest, most beguiling and affecting of all his books." - Ian Rankin
"Max Porter is one of my favorite writers in the world. Why? Because he's always asking the most important questions and then finding ways - through innovative structures and that inimitable voice -of answering those questions soulfully, with his full attention, in ways that make the world seem stranger and more dear (or more dear because stranger). He gives his readers, in other words, bursts of new vision." - George Saunders
"A troubled boy's psyche is presented in a shattered mosaic that contains within it the hope of new forms and new beginnings - this is a beautiful and haunting book, and it captures with a great artistry the resonance and rhythms of its era." - Kevin Barry
"The troubled boy at the heart of this novel is full of rage and sadness but Max Porter finds tenderness and hope in him. Just beautiful." - Mariana Enríquez
"There is no other writer quite like him, is there? His consistent ability to control the intersection of form and content, his precision, inventiveness, stylistic radiance and heart. The way Max reveals Shy's fragility without so much as a hint of sentimentality is masterful. It's a book that pushes back against the reductive nature of the now ubiquitous 'trauma plot' and, in doing so, more deeply honours the complexity of its subject." - Nathan Filer
"Shy is intensely vivid, dark and provocative. Max Porter's writing so striking, rich and evocative. Shy broke my heart and I loved him for it." - Salena Godden
"Max Porter excavates through the mess and tumult of life and of a mind, leaving us with the sharp clarity of poetry, and an emotional core of tender, beautiful prose." - Samantha Harvey
"Shy is the strangest, most beguiling and affecting of all his books." - Ian Rankin
"Max Porter is one of my favorite writers in the world. Why? Because he's always asking the most important questions and then finding ways - through innovative structures and that inimitable voice -of answering those questions soulfully, with his full attention, in ways that make the world seem stranger and more dear (or more dear because stranger). He gives his readers, in other words, bursts of new vision." - George Saunders
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