Max Porter's have a directness and power that few writers can access. He has described 'Shy', the third part in his 'trilogy about boyhood', as 'a manifesto for listening to people in pain'. It is the story of only three hours in the life of Shy, a very troubled teenager, in a young offenders' institution in 1995. What is remarkable is its style, a vivid, confusing and wild combination of Shy's experiences, memories, hallucinations and fantasies. It's a short book but I found it unbearable at times and had to put it aside more than once. It's more violent and visceral than Porter's previous books but shares their intensity and Shy's pain comes through clearly and strikingly. The ending is both fitting and a little disappointing, given the sensual overload of what precedes it, and it would be interesting to see Porter sustain his writing at greater length, but Shy completes an impressive trilogy.

𝚂𝚑𝚢 - 𝙼𝚊𝚡 𝙿𝚘𝚛𝚝𝚎𝚛 (𝟸𝟶𝟸𝟹)

Max Porter's latest novel is a disturbing story of an extremely troubled teenage boy - an intense and dark read, it's short and sharp! Extremely sharp! Porter's writing is so vivid. He is able to convey so much emotion and imagery through his distinct writing style. A true master of contemporary literature.

I particularly loved this scene:

𝙰𝚖𝚊𝚗𝚍𝚊 𝚝𝚊𝚞𝚐𝚑𝚝 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚖 𝚊𝚋𝚘𝚞𝚝 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝙽𝚘𝚛𝚗𝚜, 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚖𝚢𝚜𝚝𝚒𝚌𝚊𝚕 𝙽𝚘𝚛𝚍𝚒𝚌 𝚜𝚒𝚜𝚝𝚎𝚛𝚜, 𝚜𝚒𝚝𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚔𝚗𝚒𝚝𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚏𝚞𝚝𝚞𝚛𝚎𝚜, 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚗𝚒𝚐𝚑𝚝 𝚂𝚑𝚢 𝚠𝚊𝚜 𝚠𝚘𝚔𝚎𝚗 𝚋𝚢 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚠𝚎𝚒𝚐𝚑𝚝 𝚘𝚏 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚖 𝚜𝚊𝚝 𝚊𝚝 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚏𝚘𝚘𝚝 𝚘𝚏 𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚋𝚎𝚍, 𝚝𝚑𝚛𝚎𝚎 𝚊𝚗𝚌𝚒𝚎𝚗𝚝 𝚋𝚒𝚍𝚍𝚒𝚎𝚜, 𝚘𝚍𝚍𝚕𝚢 𝚏𝚊𝚖𝚒𝚕𝚒𝚊𝚛 𝚑𝚢𝚋𝚛𝚒𝚍𝚜 𝚘𝚏 𝙼𝚞𝚖, 𝙽𝚊𝚗𝚊, 𝙰𝚖𝚊𝚗𝚍𝚊, 𝚃𝚑𝚊𝚝𝚌𝚑𝚎𝚛, 𝙼𝚛𝚜 𝙷𝚘𝚘𝚙𝚎𝚛 𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚙𝚕𝚊𝚢𝚜𝚟𝚑𝚘𝚘𝚕 𝚝𝚎𝚊𝚌𝚑𝚎𝚛, 𝙿𝚊𝚝 𝙱𝚞𝚝𝚌𝚑𝚎𝚛, 𝙹𝚎𝚗𝚗𝚢, 𝙼𝚊𝚍𝚐𝚎 𝙱𝚒𝚜𝚑𝚘𝚙, 𝚠𝚘𝚖𝚎𝚗 𝚑𝚎'𝚜 𝚔𝚗𝚘𝚠𝚗 𝚘𝚛 𝚜𝚎𝚎𝚗 𝚘𝚛 𝚒𝚖𝚊𝚐𝚒𝚗𝚎𝚍, 𝚌𝚘𝚕𝚕𝚊𝚐𝚎𝚍 𝚝𝚘𝚐𝚎𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛, 𝚛𝚒𝚜𝚎𝚗 𝚏𝚛𝚘𝚖 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚜𝚖𝚞𝚍𝚐𝚢 𝚖𝚎𝚜𝚜 𝚘𝚏 𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚜𝚞𝚋𝚌𝚘𝚗𝚜𝚌𝚒𝚘𝚞𝚜, 𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚛𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚊𝚝 𝚑𝚒𝚖, 𝚜𝚖𝚒𝚕𝚒𝚗𝚐, 𝚌𝚕𝚌𝚔, 𝚌𝚕𝚌𝚔, 𝚘𝚗𝚎 𝚘𝚏 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚖'𝚜 𝚔𝚗𝚒𝚝𝚝𝚒𝚗𝚐, 𝚌𝚕𝚌𝚔 𝚌𝚕𝚌𝚔, 𝚏𝚊𝚝𝚎 𝚋𝚎𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚕𝚘𝚘𝚙𝚎𝚍 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚜𝚝𝚛𝚞𝚗𝚐 𝚊𝚜 𝚑𝚎 𝚏𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚜 𝚋𝚊𝚌𝚔 𝚊𝚜𝚕𝚎𝚎𝚙.

5⭐️ Thank you to #netgalley and @faberbooks for the e-arc in return for an honest review.

#contemporaryliterature #literaryfiction #novella #mentalhealth #adolescence #mentalillness #newbooks2023 #maxporter #britishliterature

Max Porter excels at creating characters who get under your skin, leaving you unable to put down his books as you have to know what is the story's full arc. I devoured Shy in one sitting - 122 pages detailing one night in the life of Shy, a problem child, a juvenile delinquent, a troubled boy, a vandal, sent to Last Chance - a home for "very disturbed young men".
His self-destruction - both in the past and present - makes for a challenging and heart-breaking read, as you want to pull him out of the pages and try and help him. He's repeatedly his own worst enemy, but is at least self-aware, seemingly incapable of resisting the madness when it takes him in its tight grasp.
Shy is a complex protagonist, creating love/hate responses in this particular reader. You veer between wanting to give him a huge hug, to wanting to give him a dry slap.
Written in a stream of consciousness, from Shy's perspective, you really feel like you get inside his head, and through understanding how he ticks, you get a fascinating look inside the head of someone you'd likely cross the street to avoid in the real world.
Unputdownable. And another great book from Max Porter. Can't wait for the next one!

'Shy' is Max Porter's fourth book and once again showcases the experimental prose style which made 'Grief Is the Thing With Feathers' and 'Lanny' so powerful. This is another short, polyphonic and imaginatively presented novel which gives us us a window into the mind of Shy, a troubled teenage boy at a 'Last Chance' countryside residential home for disturbed young men in the 1990s. The action of the novel unfolds over the course of a single night as he attempts to escape the home, but we travel back through the events that led up to his stay there and hear not just Shy's internal monologue but the other voices that make up his world - his mother, stepdad, teachers, counsellors and other residents at the home, as well as the drum and bass music Shy obsessivley listens to and the transcripts from a documentary that is being made about the home.

This is another impressive novel with some beautiful writing. In particular, I was struck once again by Porter's deep and unsentimental connection with nature and the countryside. It is by no means an easy or pleasant read - the novel takes us to some very dark places as we experience Shy's rage, violence and his desire for a different life combined with despair at the impossibility of this. There are glimmers of hope in the bonds between residents of the home, though these remain fragile and subject to destruction at any moment: "Thy each carry a private inner register of who is genuinely not OK, who is liable to go psycho, who is hard, [...] who is actual alright, and friendship seeps into the gaps of these false registers in unexpected ways, just as hatred does, just as terrible loneliness does."

In contrast to Porter's two previous novels, I did feel that the brevity of this novel was occasionally a limitation as I would have liked more development of Shy's story and I wanted more from the ending. Nonetheless, this is still an assured and compelling portrait of a vulnerable and damaged psyche. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review.

Shy is a troubled teenager at a young offenders unit and we meet him in the early hours of the morning when he is sneaking out with a rucksack full of rocks. This is set over the course of a few hours but there are glimpses into Shy's past and his time at the unit.

Having read Grief is the Thing With Feathers and Lanny I've come to expect a weird little book from Max Porter and that's exactly what I got. I loved this beyond my expectations! The stream of consciousness style worked so well for me, especially because there is so much humour laced within the pages. Shy is funny! Obviously there is so much sadness contained here too, Shy has been constantly let down by the world and doesn't really know if he wants to keep trying.

The story kind of leads up to this magical crescendo before we (and Shy) are jolted back to reality. It's just so masterfully done and I adored it. Will probably reread! Which is not something I do often.

Max Porter challenges every reader. His books take us to a part of the human condition that is often “ different to convention “ ; he provokes us to explore emotions and actions that disturb, explode and shake our sensibilities.Shy is the story of a teenager who is a resident at The Last Chance - a home for young people extricated from society. One night Shy decides to leave the house but his journey brings with it the voices, people and events of the past entering his brain and impacting upon his journey. Set in the 1990s and the incidents that led to Shy being moved to the home Max Porter’s prose is as ever poetic, sharp, jagged , raw. Shy’s life is not always a comfortable read but is interspersed with the humour and the camaraderie of the residents who all struggle to “belong” . Shy’s story, his self reflection and desire to understand life make for an absorbing read ; this is a book to return to or read slowly to fully appreciate the gift of a writer and enter the world of Shy.

so so so good. read it breathlessly in one sitting. man, max porter is so good. so much vulnerability and emotion in such a tiny book. one i’ll definitely be re-reading.

I loved ‘Grief Is a Thing with Feathers’ and ‘Lanny,’ but disliked ‘The Death of Francis Bacon’ and just didn’t get it. Luckily ‘Shy’ is a return to his first two books again. Beautifully written, honest, and truly felt emotions. It just hit me right in the stomach.
Thank you Faber & Faber and Netgalley for the ARC.

Max Porter’s magical (in all sense) “Lanny” was one of my favourite books of 2019 (alongside Ali Smith’s “Spring”) and should have gone much further than it did in the Booker Prize.

This his latest novel, while perhaps not quite as distinctive, is still of a standard to put most authors to shame and combines his Lanny-like tendency to allow his poetic prose to spill over the page, and his ability (like in his debut “ A Grief Is A Thing With Feathers” to convey a whole life in just over 100 generously spaced pages.

The book is set around 1995 – Shy is a troubled teenager “Failed 11+. Expelled from two schools. First caution 1992 aged thirteen. First arrest aged 15” who has been moved to Last Chance, an “unconventional” school which aims to rehabilitate “some of the most disturbed and violent young offenders in the country” but which faces an uncertain future as the owner of the old house in which it is based is looking for permission to convert It into “luxury self-contained flats”.

The book is set over a few hours – beginning at 3.13 am, as Shy quietly escapes the house, carrying a rucksack full of rocks (his intentions unclear but as written by an author who is redefining the stream-of-consciousness novel to look at typeface and text placement alongside language – I immediately was drawn, I think not incorrectly, to Virginia Woolf’s fate).

We are in Shy’s head and it is a veritable jumble of different threads: the Jungle music which he loves; his banter-filled interaction with his fellow Last Chance pupils; memories of his early sexual encounters; his memories and impressions of the various incidents which lead to his suspensions, cautions and arrests; dialogue from his sessions with a counsellor Jenny, some drawing on written reflections from his Mum on their relationship; more confrontational interactions with another teacher; excerpts from a promotional video and/or documentary about the school; some two page sections threaded with reproaches from his well-meaning but despairing step-father Iain and so on.

All of this is played out against his journey in a dark in a familiar landscape rendered different almost alien to him at nightime on his way to his seeming destination of a pond.

If there is something which I think might initially disappoint Grief or Lanny fans it will be the absence of nature and magic – but this changes when he encounters two “bloated dead badgers” and returns to the house, lapsing into a dream where his consciousness is merged with that of the badgers and a imagined 1960s previous occupant of his room (Eve), before a conclusion which starts as literally shattering before ending with empathy and kindness.

Ultimately this is a book which fulfills the hugely admirable manifesto Porter shared in a Guardian interview in 2019, firstly to “chafe against the risk-adverse tendency in realist contemporary British fiction” (he mentions Alan Garner as “probably the most important postwar British writer”) and secondly his suggestion that “I don’t think it is impossible to have books that are difficult or confront quite dark things or are uncomfortably honest about sexuality or whatever it is, while at the same time being fundamentally kindhearted or celebratory about the human condition.” )

Max Porter is one of the most talented writers I’ve ever come across. This novella follows a troubled boy called Shy who is struggling with mental health, controlling his anger and his relationship with his mom and step-dad. His last chance comes literally in the form of a school for troubles boys named Last Chance.

I just love how Max Porter writes and how he blends the real and the magic seamlessly no matter what he writes about. This was full of teenage angst and nineties culture but also about miscommunication and coming of age in a world where no one understands you. I really loved it and am excited for the world to read it.

The first of my little weekend novellas and my first experience with Max Porters writing. This book was centred around Shy, a young man who has dealt with hardships in life and mental illnesses and found himself in a home for delinquent juveniles. This book, while only being 120 pages, delves deep into the subject of mental health and the demons that remain after trauma. I found I needed more pages to develop a further relationship with Shy as a character but I really enjoyed the prose writing style and am looking forward to trying some more of Max Porters writing.