The Outside Boy
On sale
11th June 2020
Price: £10.99
‘A full-throated song of praise. I loved it’ Sherman Alexie
Ireland, 1959. Young Christopher Hurley is a tinker, a Pavee gypsy, who roams with his father and extended family from town to town, carrying all their worldly possessions in their wagons. Christy carries with him a burden of guilt as well: his mother’s death in childbirth.
The wandering life is the only one Christy has ever known, but when his grandfather dies, everything changes. His father decides to settle briefly, in a town, where Christy and his cousin can receive proper schooling. But still, always, they are treated as outsiders.
As Christy struggles with his new classmates, he starts to question who he is and where he belongs. But then the discovery of an old newspaper photograph, and a long-buried secret, changes his life for ever.
Ireland, 1959. Young Christopher Hurley is a tinker, a Pavee gypsy, who roams with his father and extended family from town to town, carrying all their worldly possessions in their wagons. Christy carries with him a burden of guilt as well: his mother’s death in childbirth.
The wandering life is the only one Christy has ever known, but when his grandfather dies, everything changes. His father decides to settle briefly, in a town, where Christy and his cousin can receive proper schooling. But still, always, they are treated as outsiders.
As Christy struggles with his new classmates, he starts to question who he is and where he belongs. But then the discovery of an old newspaper photograph, and a long-buried secret, changes his life for ever.
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Reviews
A poignant and magical tale
A deeply moving and elegiac look at a vanishing culture. Told in Christy's vernacular but often poetic first-person voice,THE OUTSIDE BOY is gorgeously written and an implicit celebration of Irish storytelling
Some of the greatness of Angela's Ashes dampens these pages, maybe as much as is possible for an author for whom this is fiction, not memoir. Beautifully crafted scenes and characters keep the pages turning