David Keenan and Andrew O’Hagan: Boyhood

David Keenan’s Boyhood opens in 1979 with the abduction of a young boy outside a Glasgow football ground. Nine years later, the boy’s brother, blessed with the power to see into the past and future by a perhaps imaginary angel, leads us on a journey from wartime Paris to the Troubles in the 1970s, Mexico City in the 1980s and back to Glasgow, as the novel builds to an extraordinary, intense, climactic moment of redemption.

‘A complete triumph’ writes Irvine Welsh. ‘It slaps our dull, sterile culture hard across the face with a studded, uncompromising literary glove.’

David Keenan read from Boyhood and then discussed it with LRB contributing editor Andrew O’Hagan.