Description

‘Boyhood is a complete triumph . . . it slaps our dull, sterile culture hard across the face with a studded, uncompromising literary glove’ – IRVINE WELSH

‘Reading Keenan is like reclaiming your own imagination’ – LIAS SAOUDI

Boyhood opens in 1979 with the abduction of a young boy outside a Glasgow football ground. Nine years later, the boy’s brother, Aaron Murray, is on the cusp of that moment when adolescence becomes adulthood. His own journey of grief and recovery has been guided by an angel, ‘The Precious Gift’ – perhaps imagined, perhaps real – who has blessed Aaron with redemptive, messianic powers. These have enabled him to see through the past and present, joining the dots between a vast array of characters; ballerinas, soldiers, poets, burlesque dancers, East End gangsters and the Vampire of Derry over five decades, all tied up in each other’s fate.

As Aaron’s visions span cities and decades, from wartime Paris to the Troubles in the 1970s, Mexico City in the 1980s to – of course – Glasgow, Boyhood builds to an extraordinary, intense, climactic moment of redemption.

A book of great joy, of laughter in the face of horror and delight in storytelling by the beloved and critically acclaimed author of This Is Memorial Device, Boyhood is a hymn to the resilience of youth, to the brave dreams of artists and lovers and a love letter to Glasgow – a city where magic happens.

‘Boyhood is a marvel. Impossible to sum up, it is a true novel, jumping with event and spectacle and showmanship – while speaking in its own extraordinary voice of tenderness and violence and pity and love, along with the gorgeous great fun and wonder of being alive’ – KIRSTY GUNN

Publisher Review

I didn’t think it was possible to be this impressed, challenged and entertained by a novel. Boyhood is a complete triumph. Set in locations our art now fears to go, almost every page is stuffed with amazing ideas and vibrant characters, many dripping with sexuality and ominous menace. More than this, it slaps our dull, sterile culture hard across the face with a studded, uncompromising literary glove. We have the duty and privilege of rising up to its challenge and turning those pages. The alternative is to seriously miss out * IRVINE WELSH * Boyhood is a marvel. Impossible to sum up, it is a true novel, jumping with event and spectacle and showmanship – while speaking in its own extraordinary voice of tenderness and violence and pity and love, along with the gorgeous great fun and wonder of being alive. David Keenan claims the poetic tradition of Mallarme and Apollinaire and Rimbaud and makes it his own, lighting up the streets and nights of his story in syntax that cracks and melds and conjoins, and demands the reader slow down and take in the sound and rhythm of sentences and phrases as though learning to speak them for ourselves. This is the literature of the flaneur, the surrealist, the wide-awake dreamer and myth maker made new. Singing with the passion of ideas, of reading, learning, music, the magic of a richly furnished imagination and the wonder of ritual, all formally, fully, made up and brought together – so many lives, so many dramas, deaths, loves – this is a book that was an experience I never wanted to end * KIRSTY GUNN * Reading Keenan is like reclaiming your own imagination. Writing that doesn’t just remind you – but insists belligerently over and over again – everything is possible, everything MUST be possible * LIAS SAOUDI * David Keenan is a wizard with words, each fresh work a new spell cast out across the cosmos. There’s no-one else quite like him. How could there be? * BENJAMIN MYERS * Within the great canon of Scottish literature, David Keenan once again proves himself to be a unique and spellbinding voice. He’s creating music here, savage, human and unexpected. It’s a joy to read * KARL GEARY * Boyhood is magnificent: a multilayered, constantly turning Dreamachine of Celtic comradeship, modernist revelation and Burroughsian time-bending espionage. Another total gem from the High Priest of the 21st century literary counterculture: a brilliantly unconventional murder mystery that, in its search for perpetrators of violence, ultimately uncovers the rejuvenating power of love, brotherhood and poetry * RICHARD MILWARD * A wild-hearted secret history of the twentieth century, with an occult Glasgow at its dark heart. Keenan is a magician, conjuring a world of poetry, murder, obsession and love, where nothing is real and everything matters * MAT OSMAN * Like living inside a spell unfolding as time collapses and is rebuilt in startling new patterns. David Keenan finds poetry in the dirt and darkness, and beauty in the absurd. A remarkable and moving book * JUSTIN ROBERTSON *