he Boy is a powerful novel of wasted talent, loss, greed and revenge – but also of discovered genius and life-affirming friendship. By turns terrifying, taut, humane and tender it tells the origin story of Ireland’s organised-crime epidemic with a skill and grace which belies a debut novel, and is the calling-card of a ringing new voice in Irish fiction. When the Guards knock on the door The Boy already knows his mother is dead.

His father flees to the pub, leaving him to wait alone. Soon his brother Fallon, half-protector and half-outlaw, draws him into a world where grief and crime are rarely separated. At the same time, a wealthy landowner harbours grotesque secrets in the countryside - a hidden “family” of abducted boys, a nightmare lurking beneath respectability.

As The Boy moves through these fractured worlds - his father’s guilt, his uncle’s paramilitary past, his brother’s violent death - he becomes both witness and inheritor of a brutal legacy.