Author(s): Max Porter

General Fiction

From the best-selling author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers and Lanny - the polyphonic story of a troubled teenager, with all of the humanity and trademark invention we expect from one of our most exciting writers. Things keep slipping up for Shy. All he wants is sex, spliffs and his own turntables, and for all the red noise in his mind to disappear. But again and again he spirals past his senses and ends up with his head in his hands and carnage around him. You mustn't do that to yourself, Shy. You mustn't hurt yourself like that. He's been kicked out of two schools, been cautioned, arrested, stabbed his step-dad in the finger and bottled a former Tumble Tots playmate, but it's the taunts and teasing of his new schoolmates that haunt Shy. Shy's got no armpit hair / Shy needs fake ID to buy fags / Got your specialmeds, nutcase? At Last Chance - a home for 'very disturbed young men' - he is surrounded by people who want to help him, but his night terrors aren't getting any better. The night is huge and it hurts. So tonight he's stepping into it, with the haunted beginnings of a plan.

Matilda Bookshop Review

In Max Porter's newest novella, the reader is thrown into the agitated, drum and bass fuelled mind of 15-year-old Shy as he is bombarded with a cacophony of voices and memories on a dark night in 1995. As ever, Porter’s linguistic and typographic experimentation is electric, meeting the violent turmoil of confusion, frustration, and loss felt by his protagonist with empathy and humour. Fans of Grief is the Thing with Feathers and Lanny will appreciate a return to this author’s singular ability to juxtapose the surreal and the mundane in his concise, rhythmic prose. Georgia