Why does Skippy, a fourteen-year-old boy at Dublin's venerable Seabrook College, end up dead on the floor of the local doughnut shop?
Could it have something to do with his friend Ruprecht Van Doren, an overweight genius who is determined to open a portal into a parallel universe using ten-dimensional string theory?
Could it involve Carl, the teenage drug dealer and borderline psychotic who is Skippy’s rival in love?
Or could "the Automator", the ruthless, smooth-talking headmaster intent on modernizing the school, have something to hide?
Why Skippy dies and what happens next is the subject of this dazzling and uproarious novel, unraveling a mystery that links the boys of Seabrook College to their parents and teachers in ways nobody could have imagined. With a cast of characters that ranges from hip-hop-loving fourteen-year-old Eoin "MC Sexecutioner” Flynn to basketball-playing midget Philip Kilfether, packed with questions and answers on everything from Ritalin, to M-theory, to bungee jumping, to the hidden meaning of the poetry of Robert Frost, Skippy Dies is a heartfelt, hilarious portrait of the pain, joy, and occasional beauty of adolescence, and a tragic depiction of a world always happy to sacrifice its weakest members. As the twenty-first century enters its teenage years, this is a breathtaking novel from a young writer who will come to define his generation.
With a masterful sleight of hand, Paul Murray has turned adolescence into a magical realist wonderland. This isn't Harry Potter, however - these kids are dealing with porn and drugs and lots of other heavy-duty reality. Murray navigates freely through multiple points of view, conveying the omnivorous flexibility of the boys' mental landscape and the way they exist as a sort of collective consciousness... I should say that before I began to discern flaws in the book, I had already entered deeply into it, so that my criticisms were in dialog with the themes and agendas of the novel itself. The technicolor picture Skippy Dies paints of adolescence is so engaging that by the time I made it to "Ghostland" I had already drunk the proverbial Kool-aid - the spiked punch at the Hop - and was ready to follow Paul Murray anywhere. (Reviewed by Jennifer G Wilder).
Booklist
Starred Review. Hilarious, haunting, and heartbreaking, it is inarguably among the most memorable novels of the year to date.
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. This is one of the darkest and funniest novels in recent memory.
Library Journal
Starred Review. Skippy Dies deserves to be widely read and loved.
The Sunday Times (UK)
The novel is a triumph ... Brimful of wit, narrative energy and a real poetry and vision.
Marie Claire (UK)
A real joy.
The Guardian (UK)
One of the most enjoyable, funny and moving reads of this young new year.
Elle
An utterly engrossing read.
The Times (UK)
Noisy, hilarious, tragic, and endlessly inventive ... Murray’s writing is just plain brilliant.
The Irish Times
A blast of a book.
Kirkus Reviews
Starred Review. If Harry Potter lived in an alternate Ireland, had no real magical powers but talked a good game, and fell all over himself every time he saw a girl, he might well belong in this splendid, sardonic magnum opus
What is Robert Graves doing, you might ask, in a book about rowdy teen boys? His presence is pervasive from the very first chapter, when the mysterious and beautiful new geography teacher, Aurelie, talks to Howard the Coward about how to get his history students engaged with the First World War:
"You should read them Robert Graves," she says.
"Who?"
"He was in the trenches," she replies; then adds, after a pause, "He was also one of the great love poets."
Robert Graves (1895-1985), author of many works including I, Claudius, is perhaps most famous for his memoir, Goodbye to All That, first published in 1929 when he was 34. The memoir lays out the early traumas of life at Charterhouse, a venerable public school for boys in the South of England. Upon graduation, Graves muses with a friend about what it would take to undo the crushing...
A scathingly funny and moving book about dreams and reality, at once light on its feet and unwaveringly serious.
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Robert Graves (1895-1985), author of many works including I, Claudius, is perhaps most famous for his memoir, Goodbye to All That, first published in 1929 when he was 34. The memoir lays out the early traumas of life at Charterhouse, a venerable public school for boys in the South of England. Upon graduation, Graves muses with a friend about what it would take to undo the crushing...
