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Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023
From the author of Skippy Dies comes a dazzlingly intricate and poignant tragicomedy about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good man at the end of the world.
The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie's car business is going under, but instead of doing anything about it, he's out in the woods preparing for the actual end of the world. Meanwhile his wife Imelda is selling off her jewellery on eBay and half-heartedly dodging the attentions of fast-talking local wrongun Big Mike. Their teenage daughter Cass, usually top of her class, seems determined to drink her way through the whole thing. And twelve year old PJ is spending more and more time on video game forums, where he's met a friendly boy named Ethan who never turns his camera on and wants PJ to run away from home.
Digging down through layers of family history, the roots of this crisis stretch deep into the past. Meanwhile in the present, the fault lines keep spreading, ghosts slipping in through the cracks, and every step brings the Barneses closer to a fatal precipice. When the moment of reckoning finally arrives, all four of them must decide how far they're willing to go to save the family, and whether - if the story's already been written - there's still time to give it a happy ending...
Author: Paul Murray
Trade Paperback Published 8 August 2023 656 pages
Read and Recommended by Graeme:
"This novel was the popular favourite to scoop up the Booker Prize 2023 and proved to be a Christmas bestseller even though it failed to pick up the prestigious top prize. This family saga has been extremely well reviewed though few reviews have remarked much on the queer content which becomes more prominent in the later stages of this book. It follows the Barnes family: daughter Cass in her final year of school, her 12-year-old gamer obsessed brother P.J., their glamorous mother Imelda, and her husband Dickie, whose family car sales business is failing after the 2008 financial crash. This epic novel has a series of cleverly executed twists - there is even a twist to the title - but it will spoil the story to reveal too much. But Paul Murray is another of these remarkable Irish storytellers and the book, although long at almost 650 pages, is an absolute page turner. It is funny, tragic, and ingeniously plotted, and even has some very atmospheric Irish mysticism thrown in as well. However, it’s when the novel kicks into the sections told from Imelda and Dickie’s point of view that the novel truly takes off with surprising revelations and turning points. Climate change is interwoven into the narrative and it is ironic that the Barnes family wealth is derived from car sales. As Dickie tries to forget his escalating troubles by building a doomsday bunker in the woods, a disaster looms, though it is not derived from car exhaust fumes."