A novel about guilt, rage, imagination, and boyhood, about being lost in the dark and learning you’re not alone, now adapted for the screen as STEVE, starring Cillian Murphy This is the story of a few strange hours in the life of a troubled teenage boy. You mustn’t do that to yourself Shy. You mustn’t hurt yourself like that. He is wandering into the night listening to the voices in his head: his teachers, his parents, the people he has hurt and the people who are trying to love him. Got your special meds, nutcase? He is escaping Last Chance, a home for “very disturbed young men,” and walking into the haunted space between his night terrors, his past, and the heavy question of his future. The night is huge and it hurts. In Shy , Max Porter extends the excavation of boyhood that began with Grief Is the Thing with Feathers and continued with Lanny . But here he asks: How does mischievous wonder and anarchic energy curdle into something more disturbing and violent? Shy is a bravura, lyric, music-besotted performance by one of the great writers of his generation. “ Shy ’s disordered, multidimensional consciousness careens through Max Porter’s brief and brilliant fourth book, a bravura, extended-mix of a novel that skitters, pulses, fractures and coalesces again with all the exhilaration and doom of broken beats and heavy bass lines. . . . [Shy's] both a hapless, hurting child and a dangerous, violent young man, and his author has loved each part of him into being with the same steady attention.” ―Hermione Hoby, The New York Times Book Review “Porter's compulsively readable primal scream of a novel offers a compassionate portrait of boy jerked around by uncontrollable mood swings that lead to self-sabotaging decisions.” ―Heller McAlpin, NPR.org “[Porter] may be contemporary fiction’s bard of ugly beauty and exultant despair. . . . [He] displays an unusual grasp of how consciousness moves, darting and pausing and doubling back, in real time. . . . The only magic is in the language, which makes its surprising interventions into a teenager’s life. It frames him hostilely, then with pity. It gooses and taunts him, cheers and parents him, forming him into whatever he is going to be.” ―Katy Waldman, The New Yorker “[Porter's] method relies on an original use of typography. . . . Recollections of his rage attacks appear in breathlessly pummeling single-sentence paragraphs, while some phrases loom so large in his imagination they balloon in size and push over into the following page. The effect is to make the reading a conscious, physical process, as cross-grained and obstacle-strewn as Shy’s way of existing in the world.” ―Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal “ Shy is worthy fourth novel by a master craftsman and artist.” ―John Slayton, New York Journal of Books “[ Shy ] exists in a fascinating liminal space: a painful and unexplored past and an uncertain future. Porter is at his finest here.” ―Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books “Porter sets himself the challenge of rendering the least palatable of these children sympathetic: the kind of boy who has a lot going for him, a lot of privilege, and can’t seem to do anything but make a mess of it. . . . His technique of layering snatches of thought, memory, and feeling deftly, in a manner that feels instinctive, makes Shy’s perspective seem not only understandable but inevitable to the reader. But this success is also partly due to the immersive, compulsively readable quality of Porter’s writing: A novel that asks you to spend time with a difficult character is most successful, I would argue, when it is enjoyable and entertaining to read.” ―Rachel Connolly, The New Republic “[A] slender burst of Joycean prose. . . . There’s an arresting quality to the narrative’s frantic breaths of prose poetry and brief, fractured form. As an experiment in character seen from the inside out, [ Shy ] stands as a singular shoutout to lost boys everywhere.” ― Publishers Weekly “Porter does a fine job of inhabiting the mind of a teenager in ways that may remind readers of David Mitchell’s novel Black Swan Green , with all the confusion and lack of resolution that come with the territory. . . . Porter gets his bumbling, anomic antihero down to a T.” ― Kirkus Reviews “Porter does more in fewer pages than virtually any Anglophone author, with expressionist storms that surge and sigh within a tight frame. . . . There’s rage and pain and the glimmer of redemption. Most of all, there is beautiful prose.” ―Hamilton Cain, The Rumpus “ Shy is . . . written out of love for its bewildered subject. It offers a challenge to recognize the complexity of the difficult road faced by boys like Shy, as well as to understand them complexly―to see both their struggle and their joy, to meet them where they find themselves, and to help lighten the load.” ―Joel Pinckney, Los Angeles Review of Books “Max Porter is one of my favorite writers in the world. Why?