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  • Published: 9 June 2011
  • ISBN: 9780141009957
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 672
  • RRP: $27.99

Skippy Dies

From the author of The Bee Sting




'Marvellous, witty, heartbreaking, intensely moving, excellent. The writing is second to none, the banter brilliant. Crazy, but beautiful' Daily Telegraph

'Skippy and Ruprecht are having a doughnut-eating race one evening when Skippy turns purple and falls off his chair . . .'

And so begins this epic, tragic, comic, brilliant novel set in and around Dublin's Seabrook College for Boys. Principally concerning the lives, loves, mistakes and triumphs of overweight maths-whiz Ruprecht Van Doren and his roommate Daniel 'Skippy' Juster, it features a frisbee-throwing siren called Lori, the joys (and horrors) of first love, the use and blatant misuse of prescription drugs, Carl (the official school psychopath), various attempts to unravel string theory . . . while at the same time exploring the very deepest mysteries of the human heart.

  • Published: 9 June 2011
  • ISBN: 9780141009957
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 672
  • RRP: $27.99

About the author

Paul Murray

Date: 2005-01-07
Paul Murray, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, is a writer and diplomat who has served in London, Tokyo, Ottawa, New York and Seoul. His biography, A Fantastic Journey: The Life and Literature of Lafcadio Hearn (1993), won the Koizumi Yakumo Literary Prize (Japan) in 1995. He has published and lectured in Europe, the USA and Asia.

Paul Murray was born in 1975. He studied English literature at Trinity College in Dublin. He has a Masters degree in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. Paul was a former bookseller. An Evening of Long Goodbyes was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award in 2003 and was nominated for the Kerry Irish Fiction Award. Skippy Dies was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Costa Best Novel Award. 

Also by Paul Murray

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Praise for Skippy Dies

Savagely funny, brimful of wit, energy, poetry and vision, unflaggingly entertaining. A triumph

Sunday Times

One of the most enjoyable, funny and moving reads of this year. A rare tragicomedy that's both genuinely tragic and genuinely comic

Guardian

Darkly comic, dazzles, every line drips ideas for fun. Unputdownably funny, captivating. A masterpiece

Metro

Ambitious, wise, funny, fiercely intelligent. The beauty of this cynical, hopeful, beautifully written book is that it builds a detailed world to explore life, the universe and everything

Sunday Express

Hilarious, heartbreaking, totally engrossing. A triumph

Daily Mail

Noisy, hilarious, tragic, endlessly inventive, plain brilliant. A carnival of a novel

The Times

Savagely funny, brimful of wit, energy, poetry and vision, unflaggingly entertaining. A triumph

Sunday Times

One of the most enjoyable, funny and moving reads of this year. A rare tragicomedy that's both genuinely tragic and genuinely comic

Guardian

Darkly comic, dazzles, every line drips ideas for fun. Unputdownably funny, captivating. A masterpiece

Metro

Ambitious, wise, funny, fiercely intelligent. The beauty of this cynical, hopeful, beautifully written book is that it builds a detailed world to explore life, the universe and everything

Sunday Express

Hilarious, heartbreaking, totally engrossing. A triumph

Daily Mail

Novels rarely come as funny and as moving as this utterly brilliant exploration of teenhood and the anticlimax of becoming an adult . . . Skippy Dies is intuitive, truthful and one of the finest comic novels written anywhere. Dies? Never! Skippy lives

Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

I loved Skippy Dies . . . three novels fused into one ignited tragicomic tour de force

Ali Smith, Times Literary Supplement

Skippy Dies is one great high-octane fizz bang of a book

Patrick McCabe, Irish Times

Extravagantly entertaining

New York Times Book Review

A comic epic. Murray is a brilliant comic writer, but also humane and touching, and he captures the misery and elation, joy and anxiety of teenage life. A brilliant depiction of the heaven and hell of male adolescence

David Nicholls, Guardian

Murray's writing has earned a place in the contemporary international canon . . . Murray's characters are so three-dimensionally drawn and brought to such vivid life that they may haunt your dreams

Irish Independent