Title: The Boy
Author: Mark Gyves
Genre: Crime Fiction
Publisher: No Exit Press
Publication Date: 24th September 2026
Rating: 4.5/5
Cover:
Summary:
The 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.
Review:
The Boy is the kind of propulsive and fast moving novel that is almost impossible to look away from. We follow the titular ‘Boy’ (whose name we never learn) as he experiences terrible loss and is thrust into the dark and unforgiving criminal underworld. What impressed me most about The Boy is the quality of the writing. There is a sort of lyrical quality to the prose and dialogue in a way that makes it sort of flow and weave its way through the unflinching narrative like a fast moving river. There is admittedly a lot of darkness within this story and yet it never feels unrelentingly bleak, because there is also heart and emotion to be found throughout even if that emotion is sometimes of a more bittersweet nature. I loved the way the short chapters introduce the reader to a broad range of different characters and the way the full picture slowly emerges of how they, and the different strands of the almost unbearably tense crime story, all connect and twist together whilst the novel picks up pace. The Boy is a seriously impressive debut. It is sharp, brutal, bold, and viscerally raw. I found it genuinely quite unputdownable and can’t wait to read more from this author. Highly recommended.
★★★★.5
Huge thanks to Novel Tours and the publisher for having me on the tour and sending me the book. My review is entirely my own honest opinion.
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