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A Novel
by Garrett Carr
Set on the coast of Ireland in the 1970s, a captivating debut novel about a baby boy who is discovered on the beach beside a small fishing town, as told by the locals who fall under the boy's transfixing spell.
In Donegal, Ireland, 1973, a baby boy is found on the beach of a close-knit fishing village. After the baby has been carried through the crowd of onlookers, fisherman Ambrose Bonnar—a man of great bulk, and great heart—offers to bring the child into his own family: his son, Declan, wife, Christine, and up the lane, Christine's sister and aging father. The townspeople remain fascinated by the baby, now named Brendan, as he grows into a strange yet charismatic young man.
The Boy from the Sea tells the story of this family and this community, bookended by the arrival and departure of one mesmerizing boy. It charts, over the decades, the rise and fall of the family's fortunes—and the town's, because nothing happens to one family here that doesn't happen to them all—as the combined forces of a voracious global economy and modernized commercial fishing wreak havoc on their long-held way of life. In the village, Brendan and Declan are wildly different and often wildly at odds; out on the sea, Ambrose worries about his children, but cannot afford to tear his attention from the brutal work that keeps his family afloat. As the world around them keeps changing, the mystery of one boy's origins pulls them all toward a surprising, stormy fate.
Both outrageously funny and incredibly moving, The Boy from the Sea is a dazzling novel from a major new voice in Irish literature.
"A ruefully funny portrait of a dysfunctional family in a struggling town, The Boy from the Sea rings painfully true. I was gripped." —Emma Donoghue, author of The Wonder
"Compulsive reading ... Compassionate, lyrical and full of devilment." —Louise Kennedy, author of Trespasses
"The Boy from the Sea has that rare quality I often find myself searching for in a novel – narrative intimacy among the vastness of life. Garrett Carr is meticulous and precise in his writing – the skilled invisibility of a true craftsman. This book is fully alive, and enlivens the reader with it." —Rónán Hession, author of Ghost Mountain
This information about The Boy from the Sea was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Garrett Carr teaches Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen's University Belfast, and he is a frequent contributor to The Guardian and The Irish Times. His non-fiction The Rule of the Land: Walking Ireland's Border was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. The Boy from the Sea is his debut novel.
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