Skippy Dies - Paul Murray

Skippy is so desperately, painfully alive that you hope the mere act of reading about him will save him . . .

A virtuosic display you'd expect from a writer with the confidence to kill off his title character in the title.--Radhika Jones, TIME. n nWhy does Skippy, a fourteen-year-old boy at Dublin's venerable Seabrook College, end up dead on the floor of the local doughnut shop?n nCould it have something to do with his friend Ruprecht Van Doren, an overweight genius who is determined to open a portal into a parallel universe using ten-dimensional string theory?n nCould it involve Carl, the teenage drug dealer and borderline psychotic who is Skippy's rival in love?n nOr could the Automator--the ruthless, smooth-talking headmaster intent on modernizing the school--have something to hide?n nWhy Skippy dies and what happens next is the subject of this dazzling and uproarious novel, unraveling a mystery that links the boys of Seabrook College to their parents and teachers in ways nobody could have imagined. With a cast of characters that ranges from hip-hop-loving fourteen-year-old Eoin MC Sexecutioner Flynn to basketball playing midget Philip Kilfether, packed with questions and answers on everything from Ritalin, to M-theory, to bungee jumping, to the hidden meaning of the poetry of Robert Frost, Skippy Dies is a heartfelt, hilarious portrait of the pain, joy, and occasional beauty of adolescence, and a tragic depiction of a world always happy to sacrifice its weakest members.

As the twenty-first century enters its teenage years, this is a breathtaking novel from a young writer who will come to define his generation.n