Shy: A Novel [Paperback]

A novel about guilt, rage, imagination, and boyhood, about being lost in the dark and learning youre not alone, now adapted for the screen as STEVE, starring Cillian Murphy


This is the story of a few strange hours in the life of a troubled teenage boy.

You mustnt do that to yourself Shy. You mustnt hurt yourself like that.

He is wandering into the night listening to the voices in his head: his teachers, his parents, the people he has hurt and the people who are trying to love him.

Got your special meds, nutcase?

He is escaping Last Chance, a home for very disturbed young men, and walking into the haunted space between his night terrors, his past, and the heavy question of his future.

The night is huge and it hurts.

InShy, Max Porter extends the excavation of boyhood that began withGriefIs the Thing with Feathersand continued withLanny. But here he asks: How does mischievous wonder and anarchic energy curdle into something more disturbing and violent?Shyis a bravura, lyric, music-besotted performance by one of the great writers of his generation.

Shys disordered, multidimensional consciousness careens through Max Porters brief and brilliant fourth book, a bravura, extended-mix of a novel that skitters, pulses, fractures and coalesces again with all the exhilaration and doom of broken beats and heavy bass lines. . . . [Shy's] both a hapless, hurting child and a dangerous, violent young man, and his author has loved each part of him into being with the same steady attention.Hermione Hoby,The New York Times Book Review

Porter's compulsively readable primal scream olC0