Showing results by narrator "Clodagh Bowyer" in All Categories

This touching and uproarious novel by author Paul Murray made everyone’s best fiction of 2010 lists, including The Washington Post, Financial Times, Village Voice, and others. Why Skippy dies and what happens next is the mystery that links the boys of Dublin’s Seabrook College (Ruprecht Van Doren, the overweight genius obsessed with string theory; Carl, the teenager drug dealer and borderline psychotic; Philip Kilfether, the basketball-playing midget) to their parents and teachers in ways that no one could have imagined.

The short fiction of Colum McCann documents a dizzying cast of characters in exile, loss, love, and displacement. There is the worn boxing champion who steals clothes from a New Orleans laundromat, the rumored survivor of Hiroshima who immigrates to the tranquil coast of Western Ireland, the Irishwoman who journeys through America in search of silence and solitude.

In a daring tour de force, one of our writers takes on the most intractable of conflicts-the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In his fourth book, Colum McCann, a writer of fierce originality and haunting lyricism, turns to the Troubles and reveals, as only fiction writers can the reverberations of political tragedy in the most intimate lives of men and women, parents and children.