Author: John Boyne

Long before we discovered that he had fathered two children by two different women, one in Drimoleague and one in Clonakilty, Father James Monroe stood on the altar of the Church of Our Lady, Star of the Sea, in the parish of Goleen, West Cork, and denounced my mother as a whore.

With an opening paragraph like that you are drawn into the book from the very beginning. Told mainly from the point of view of Cyril, the very reason his mother was ousted from her home and village, he is adopted by a fairly well-to-do family but it was always acknowledged the he is their adopted son and they were his adopted parents, not a “real Avery”.

The book follows the tormented life of a gay man in Ireland, as well as a better life in Amsterdam and the United States. At the end of his life Cyril returns to Ireland to find that not a lot has changed.

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