Kieron Smith, Boy
Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
An award-winning novel of urban boyhood: “No other . . . comes as close as this to Catcher in the Rye.” —The Literary Review
A Man Booker Prize–winning author brings us inside the head of a young boy in a novel that offers a “splendid evocation of childhood in mid-20th-century Glasgow” (The Washington Post).
Here is the story of a boyhood in a large industrial city during a time of great social change. Kieron grows from age five to early adolescence amid the general trauma of everyday life—the death of a beloved grandparent, the move to a new home. A whole world is brilliantly realized: sectarian football matches; ferryboats on the river; the unfairness of being a younger brother; climbing drainpipes, trees, and roofs; dogs, cats, sex, and ghosts—all rendered in the unmistakable perspective of youth, offering “a vivid reminder that childhood is a foreign country” (Kirkus Reviews).
“A book full of the wonder of growing up . . . A magnificent and important novel.” —Financial Times
“Recalls the modernist experiments of Joyce and Woolf . . . Kelman is a writer of singular will and sincerity.” —The New York Times Book Review
“As an urban coming-of-age, the novel also reminded me of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. . . . This funny, sad and deeply entrancing novel works as dreams do: by seduction, by raising strange spirits, and by delivering a world entire. It represents a triumph for Kelman, as hard and uproarious as a Glasgow Saturday night.” —The Washington Post
“Kelman’s raw, blunt narration drives home all of Kieron’s loneliness, sadness and feelings of inadequacy. If you can roll with the Scots dialect, the narrative is rewarding, bleak and marvelous.” —Publishers Weekly
A Man Booker Prize–winning author brings us inside the head of a young boy in a novel that offers a “splendid evocation of childhood in mid-20th-century Glasgow” (The Washington Post).
Here is the story of a boyhood in a large industrial city during a time of great social change. Kieron grows from age five to early adolescence amid the general trauma of everyday life—the death of a beloved grandparent, the move to a new home. A whole world is brilliantly realized: sectarian football matches; ferryboats on the river; the unfairness of being a younger brother; climbing drainpipes, trees, and roofs; dogs, cats, sex, and ghosts—all rendered in the unmistakable perspective of youth, offering “a vivid reminder that childhood is a foreign country” (Kirkus Reviews).
“A book full of the wonder of growing up . . . A magnificent and important novel.” —Financial Times
“Recalls the modernist experiments of Joyce and Woolf . . . Kelman is a writer of singular will and sincerity.” —The New York Times Book Review
“As an urban coming-of-age, the novel also reminded me of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. . . . This funny, sad and deeply entrancing novel works as dreams do: by seduction, by raising strange spirits, and by delivering a world entire. It represents a triumph for Kelman, as hard and uproarious as a Glasgow Saturday night.” —The Washington Post
“Kelman’s raw, blunt narration drives home all of Kieron’s loneliness, sadness and feelings of inadequacy. If you can roll with the Scots dialect, the narrative is rewarding, bleak and marvelous.” —Publishers Weekly
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