by John Boyne
First published 2014
Odran Yates enters Clonliffe Seminary in the 1970s certain he is giving his life to something good. In Ireland at that time, priests walk with authority and the trust of every family on their street. Odran believes in all of it. Forty years pass. The abuse scandals break open, and the world Odran built his identity inside crumbles publicly and fast. His friends face trial. His colleagues go to prison. Destroyed young lives fill the newspapers. Odran grows afraid to walk into a shop, and when he takes a lost boy's hand in a department store to find the child's mother, police arrest him. He is guilty of nothing in that moment, and yet he is not innocent. A family crisis forces him to stop looking away. He has to name what he knew, what he ignored, and how his silence fed the very harm he told himself he would never cause. This is a novel about a man who chose comfort over conscience and spent decades not admitting it, even to himself.
Genres: drama, literary-fiction, irish-literature, contemporary, adult-fiction
Vibes: dark, emotionally-devastating, introspective, morally-complex, thought-provoking
Tropes: coming-of-age, family-crisis, reckoning-with-the-past, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Ireland, Clonliffe Seminary
Period: 1970s, 20th-century
384 pages · Paperback · Doubleday
Content warnings: abuse, child-abuse, pedophilia