Short and bitter-sweet, the book is a psychological spewing of a troubled teen’s brain, from the “Reebok rucksack he’s had forever” which stays permanently glued to his back, to the “Hard work, getting harder, hacking through voices”.
We never learn what got him there, only whispers of "the lighter fluid incident" and vexing flashbacks to Shy’s youth, littered with misbehaviour and feeling misunderstood. The lyrics of DJ Randall, Congo Natty and the likes are scattered amongst foggy memories of his childhood, troubled dreams of the girl “who mutters in the walls between his room”, and his current experiences at Last Chance, “a school for badly behaved boys in the middle of bumble f*** no where”.
Max lives in Bath with his family.We follow the eponymous Shy, a teen of the 90s, whose Walkman-played drum-and-bass is his only solace from the relentless pressures of everyday life. His most recent project is All Of This Unreal Time, which premiered at Manchester International Festival in July 2021. He frequently collaborates with artists and musicians. Complicité and Wayward’s production of Grief is the Thing with Feathers directed by Enda Walsh and starring Cillian Murphy was performed in Dublin, London and New York. It has been sold in thirty-one territories. His first novel, Grief is the Thing with Feathers, won the Sunday Times/Peter, Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year, the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the Europese Literatuurprijs and the BAMB Readers’ Award and was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Goldsmiths Prize. His Sunday Times Top Ten bestseller Lanny was longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize and the 2019 Wainwright Prize, shortlisted for the 2019 Gordon Burn Prize and shortlisted for both Waterstones and Foyles Book of the Year 2019. Max Porter is the author of The Death of Francis Bacon, praised as ‘a miniature masterpiece’, and ‘a feat of empathy, imagination and literary brio’.
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