When his mother’s death shatters his world, a boy is drawn into Cork’s criminal underbelly — a lyrical, devastating story of family, violence and the inescapable legacy of grief, for fans of Colin Barrett, Donal Ryan and Stuart Neville.

THE BOY is a novel of devastating 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.

Think of a space where the layered complexity of Tana French meets the whip-smart dialogue and brutal beauty of Colin Barrett and the sharp tenderness and humour of Graeme Armstrong’s The Young Team – and you’re somewhere near where this novel will take you.

THE BOY is a dark, lyrical crime debut. It is unflinching, propulsive, and unforgettable.