Paul Murray
Seven years after his award-nominated debut novel, An Evening of Long Goodbyes, Paul Murray’s long-awaited second novel Skippy Dies, has been described as “one of the most funny, enjoyable and moving reads of the year” (the Guardian). We can’t wait to hear him telling us all about it at Port Eliot this year.
A dark comedy set in a Dublin Catholic school run by priests, it follows the lives of a group of boarding school boys interwoven with the hapless romantic adventures of their emotionally inadequate history teacher, Howard (the coward).
Murray skillfully replicates the adolescence mindset of teenage boys: the optimism and cynicism, the fantasy and cruelty – supported with a dialogue that’s joyful, dirty and sex-obsessed. Along with satchels full of comedy, there’s also a tragic undertone – but Murray doesn’t shy away from the difficult material and covers everything from love and death to the war and drugs to porn and prehistoric portals into fairy kingdoms.
An Evening of Long Goodbyes was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Kerry Irish Fiction Award in 2003. It’s a hilarious satire of modern Ireland told through the eyes of a clueless young idler who prefers to watch Gene Tierney movies in his chaise lounge rather than go out and find a job.
“A gigantic, marvellous, witty, heartbreaking novel … Murray is excellent at capturing the woes of adolescence…the writing is second to none, the banter between boys brilliant”
— The Daily Telegraph
“Paul Murray proves that he can conjure up a whole psychic world, from its darkest, most savagely funny cruelty to its wildest flights of fantasy-fuelled innocence.”
— The Sunday Times
Links:
- Interview with Paul Murray in Notes from the Underground
- Review of Skippy Dies in the Sunday Times
- Review of Skippy Dies in the Observer
