*NUMBER 1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER*
‘A perfect book’
‘A miracle of language’
‘Extraordinary’
‘Dazzling’
‘Visionary’
‘Magnificent’
‘Exhilarating’
‘Virtuoso’
‘Spectacular’
A stormy and moving story about Shy, an angry young man in a world of barbed wire, in a world of bruises. In language that shimmers, rages and churns, Max Porter has once again written an unparalleled masterpiece.
Marieke Lucas Rijneveld
Max Porter has a way of writing unlike anyone else. I loved Shy. I finished it elated and tearful, joyful and terrified, changed by the journey. It moved me and surprised me and that is what I look for in my favourite artists.
PJ Harvey
In SHY, the graceful, mighty, minute, ranging mind of the teenage boy is given necessary and precious space. As with Max Porter's previous books, this is living poetry-prose, pulsative, growing, coming of age, borderless in its thinking, boundaryless in its approach….all against a subtle backdrop of a country under bad governance, and the gentle, invisible care of those who look after our most vulnerable… This is a sonorous document that pulses with lived experience of landscape and person, a totally inimitable portrait of a rural life on the cusp of the millennium. The space Max makes for his characters is large, generous, real, open. SHY took me straight back to my teen-self, all her buck-toothed strangenesses and shyness, and made me want to hold her a little bit closer.
Rachael Allen
A troubled boy’s psyche is presented in a shattered mosaic that contains within it the hope of new forms and new beginnings - this is a beautiful and haunting book, and it captures with a great artistry the resonance and rhythms of its era.
Kevin Barry
The troubled boy at the heart of this novel is full of rage and sadness, but Max Porter finds tenderness and hope in him. Just beautiful.
Mariana Enriquez
I kept thinking of Mrs Dalloway. The comparison seems utterly inappropriate, and yet where else had I experienced a character lift off the page in this way, with such scattered force? And yet also with such choral beauty. It's a prose-bomb, this book; brief and brilliant.
Samantha Harvey
Rattling out a fast snare rhythm above an undertow of bubbling, mournful sub-bass, SHY is full of soul, sweat and spunk - a sad, wild, beautiful, brave and funny journey through one struggling teenager's brain.
Will Ashon
I think it's extraordinarily accomplished work. There is no other writer quite like Max, is there? The way he reveals Shy’s fragility without so much as a hint of sentimentality is masterful. I was so pleased that there was no attempt to explain away his behaviour as the result of a single traumatic incident. It's a book that pushes back against the reductive nature of the now ubiquitous 'trauma plot' and, in doing so, more deeply honours the complexity of its subject.
Nathan Filer
In SHY Max Porter excavates through the mess and tumult of life and of a mind, leaving us with the sharp clarity of poetry, and an emotional core of tender, beautiful prose.
Andrew McMillan
SHY is the strangest, most beguiling and affecting of all his books.
Ian Rankin
SHY is intensely vivid, dark and provocative. Max Porter's writing so striking, rich and evocative. Shy broke my heart and I loved him for it.
Salena Godden
SHY is a virtuoso performance, Max Porter is at the height of his tender, daredevil powers. This book is snarling and sweet, a dream-tumble through dark nights of the soul, hitting you in the guts over and over with its masterful polyrhythms and bass drops.
Omar Bin Musa
