I heard about this on one of my podcasts: All the Books and Liberty LOVED it and really made me want to read it and I am glad I did!
What a fabulous book. Great storytelling....great characters, relevant and important themes. I just wanted to keep reading this book forever
Here is the Kirkus Review. They liked it too.
The Irish writer’s 10th novel for adults examines one man’s life
over the course of 70 years to reveal the personal and societal toll of
Ireland’s repression of homosexuality.
It’s 1945, and a philandering Catholic priest is throwing
16-year-old Catherine Goggin out of church and the village for being unwed and pregnant as her family
looks on silently. With quick strokes and bitter humor, Boyne’s (A History
of Loneliness, 2015, etc.) opening scene encapsulates the Irish church’s
hypocrisy and utter control of a meek flock. Having taken on the church’s
sexual abuse of children in his previous novel, Boyne continues his crusading
ways with the quiet keening of this painful, affecting novel. Catherine will
travel to Dublin and give birth after saving the life of a gay youth whose partner is beaten to death by his own
father. Her son, Cyril, the book’s first-person narrator, is adopted in infancy
by a wealthy Dublin couple. He is smitten at 7 with a boy his age who visits
the house, and even more so at 14, when they are roommates in school, but he
mutes his passion for the handsome, charismatic Julian as they become close
friends. As Boyne captures Cyril every seven years, his 20s feature a double
life, secret promiscuity and public straightness. Then, he briefly marries
(1973), flees Ireland, finds love in Amsterdam (1980), and works with AIDs
patients in New York (1987). There, he suffers two wrenching losses—which also,
happily, mark the end of Cyril’s tendency to forget he’s a witty, ironic
conversationalist and veer close to maudlin self-pity. His later years in
Ireland seem to bring the promise of reconciliation on several fronts, but
there is still penance and pain until the book’s last word.
A dark novel marred by occasional melodrama but lightened by
often hilarious dialogue.