Skippy Dies

Description

'Marvellous, witty, heartbreaking, intensely moving, excellent. The writing is second to none, the banter brilliant. Crazy, but beautiful' Daily Telegraph 'Skippy and Ruprecht are having a doughnut-eating race one evening when Skippy turns purple and falls off his chair . . .' And so begins this epic, tragic, comic, brilliant novel set in and around Dublin's Seabrook College for Boys. Principally concerning the lives, loves, mistakes and triumphs of overweight maths-whiz Ruprecht Van Doren and his roommate Daniel 'Skippy' Juster, it features a frisbee-throwing siren called Lori, the joys (and horrors) of first love, the use and blatant misuse of prescription drugs, Carl (the official school psychopath), various attempts to unravel string theory . . . while at the same time exploring the very deepest mysteries of the human heart.

Paul Murray is the author of An Evening of Long Goodbyes, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award in 2003, and Skippy Dies, which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award in 2010 and (in the United States) the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Mark and the Void is his third novel. He lives in Dublin.

Savagely funny, brimful of wit, energy, poetry and vision, unflaggingly entertaining. A triumph * Sunday Times * One of the most enjoyable, funny and moving reads of this year. A rare tragicomedy that's both genuinely tragic and genuinely comic * Guardian * Darkly comic, dazzles, every line drips ideas for fun. Unputdownably funny, captivating. A masterpiece * Metro * Ambitious, wise, funny, fiercely intelligent. The beauty of this cynical, hopeful, beautifully written book is that it builds a detailed world to explore life, the universe and everything * Sunday Express * Hilarious, heartbreaking, totally engrossing. A triumph * Daily Mail * Novels rarely come as funny and as moving as this utterly brilliant exploration of teenhood and the anticlimax of becoming an adult . . . Skippy Dies is intuitive, truthful and one of the finest comic novels written anywhere. Dies? Never! Skippy lives -- Eileen Battersby * Irish Times * I loved Skippy Dies . . . three novels fused into one ignited tragicomic tour de force -- Ali Smith * Times Literary Supplement * Skippy Dies is one great high-octane fizz bang of a book -- Patrick McCabe * Irish Times * Extravagantly entertaining * New York Times Book Review * A comic epic. Murray is a brilliant comic writer, but also humane and touching, and he captures the misery and elation, joy and anxiety of teenage life. A brilliant depiction of the heaven and hell of male adolescence -- David Nicholls * Guardian * Murray's writing has earned a place in the contemporary international canon . . . Murray's characters are so three-dimensionally drawn and brought to such vivid life that they may haunt your dreams * Irish Independent *