Where Are the Kings

From Irish Book Award winner and Booker finalist Donal Ryan, a funny, tender novel about a young boy who comes of age amid the fallout from his mother’s death

Jack is eleven years old when he bikes furiously down the hill after his mother’s car, desperate to catch her before she reaches the lake. What happens next cannot be undone.

During the already tumultuous years of adolescence, when nothing makes sense even under the best of circumstances, Jack is thrust into a family he’s never known: his mother’s parents, ferocious Nana and temperamental Grandad; his gruff uncles, Haulie and Theo, who teach him everything from quantum physics to how to hunt deer; their kid brother, the irascible JJ, who’s young enough to be Jack’s cousin; and his beautiful aunt Rose. Loving as it is, this big, chaotic family is hiding something from Jack—something about the mother who disappeared into the lake and the father who was institutionalized after her death. How can a boy with so many questions, in a family with so many secrets, understand the person he is becoming?

A heartbreaking, wisecracking ode to family and to the complexity of love, Where Are the Kings is Donal Ryan’s most powerful and beautifully written novel yet.