Shy
A Novel
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING CILLIAN MURPHY
One of The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2023
In a dilapidated mansion, in the middle of the night, a young man is considering what could be his final decision in this world.
The rucksack is shockingly heavy.
The floorboards complain.
He checks again, the spliff is diagonal-snug in the empty Embassy box.
The daytime check is a half-dream away.
The room is molten soft. Tempting.
Jumpy.
The rucksack is shockingly heavy.
It’s 3:13 a.m.
Shy. A troubled teen, a "dangerous young man," a reject from the social structures that no longer wish to nurture him. Shy knows that society has not failed him, he has failed it—parents, schooling, friends and sometime girlfriends. Judged and found wanting, he now lives at Last Chance, a boarding school for boys like him.
Set over a few hours of a single evening, Shy exists between the stillness and beauty of a nocturne and the exhilarating shout of simultaneous teenage joy and anguish. With leaps of linguistic brilliance and wild energy, this is an utterly immersive novel in its authenticity and heart-breaking honesty. As with all Porter’s writing, the darkness is indivisible from a core of humour and humanity. It is his greatest feat of empathy yet.
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.
