Shy
THE NUMBER ONE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
'Max Porter is one of my favourite writers in the world.' George Saunders
'Beautiful and haunting.' Kevin Barry
'The strangest, most beguiling and affecting of all his books.' Ian Rankin
'A miracle of language.' Irish Times
This is the story of a few strange hours in the life of a teenage boy.
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.
He is feeling a little sorry for himself.
Shy is a novel about imagination, guilt and boyhood. It is about being lost in the dark, and realising you are not alone.
'Contemporary fiction's bard of ugly beauty and exultant despair.' New Yorker
'An act of humanity and grace, heightened by its distinctive form and artistry.' Telegraph
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Porter (Grief Is the Thing with Feathers) dispatches a slender burst of Joycean prose detailing the fragmented psyche of a troubled teenage boy in 1995 England. Expelled from two schools, Shy is poised between the mess he's made of his past and his uncertain future. The reader meets him as he's escaping from Last Chance, the institution to which he's been consigned by his worried mother and archnemesis of a stepfather, with only his techno mixtape for comfort. What ensues is a frantic collage of memories, regrets, dreams, and an inner monologue that emerges piecemeal until Shy surfaces as a pure if disturbed soul caught in desperate circumstances. His lowlife friends have nearly abandoned him and his well-meaning teachers are not to be trusted. Shy may tell himself, "There's more to life than drum n bass. There's more to life than getting wasted," but it will take a drugged-out encounter with his personal demons before he can begin to reckon with what shape that life may take. There's an arresting quality to the narrative's frantic breaths of prose poetry and brief, fractured form. As an experiment in character seen from the inside out, it stands as a singular shoutout to lost boys everywhere.
Customer Reviews
Not like everybody else
4.5 stars
Author
British writer of experimental fiction. Multiple awards. This is his fourth novel. I gave his second, Lanny (2019), seven stars (out of 5).
Summary
It’s the 1990s. The titular character is a troubled teen been expelled from multiple schools for transgressive behaviour. We meet him as he sneaks out at night from his latest, Last Chance, an appropriately named residential facility for troubled teen boys.
In the first person narrative, Shy relives a number of experiences, both good and bad, involving his parents, various teachers, and his peers, through which the author paints a convincing picture of misunderstood youth barely holding it together.
Writing
Mr P’s protagonists are, to paraphrase Ray Davies of The Kinks, not like everybody else. Neither is his sparer than spare prose, which is astoundingly skilful and deeply moving.