Archive for November 23, 2010

SKIPPY DIES by Paul Murray

The Ireland that is the setting for Paul Murray’s delightful novel SKIPPY DIES, is not the one we have heard about recently in the news—crippled by debt and threatening to bring down the Euro. Instead, the novel is set in the not-so-distant past when the roaring Celtic Tiger was a prominent player on the world economic stage. SKIPPY DIES is set in an Ireland where the “past is considered dead weight—at best something to reel in tourists, at worst an embarrassment, an albatross, a raving, incontinent old relative that refuses to die.”

It is in this Ireland that the boys of Seabrook College, the primary characters in the novel, come of age. One of their frequent haunts away from school is Ed’s Doughnuts House, a franchise branch of an international food chain. And it is at Ed’s where, in the very first chapter of the book, Skippy dies.

November 23, 2010 · Judi Clark · No Comments
Tags: Around-the-World, Contemporary · Posted in: 2010 Top Picks, Coming-of-Age, Contemporary, Reading Guide, United Kingdom, World Literature