Boyhood

Our summary description

As Independent Scottish booksellers, we write all of our descriptions personally, we hope you enjoy this one.

In 1979, a young boy is abducted outside a Glasgow football ground. Nine years later, his brother Aaron Murray stands on the brink between adolescence and adulthood, living with the aftershock of what was taken and what could not be repaired.

Aaron’s journey of grief and recovery is guided by an angel called The Precious Gift, perhaps imagined, perhaps real, who blesses him with redemptive, messianic powers. Through these visions, Aaron begins to see through past and present at once, joining the dots between a vast cast of lives: ballerinas, soldiers, poets, burlesque dancers, East End gangsters, the Vampire of Derry. Over five decades, their fates knot together.

As Aaron’s sight moves across cities and decades, from wartime Paris to the Troubles in the 1970s, Mexico City in the 1980s and back to Glasgow, the story gathers momentum towards a climactic moment of redemption. It holds laughter alongside horror, and delight in storytelling as a kind of endurance, rooted in youth, art, love, and a city where magic happens.