Kieron Smith, Boy

Kieron Smith, Boy Synopsis

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 Prizewinning 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 lifethe 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 ghostsall 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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