Boyhood
On sale
9th April 2026
Price: £23
Cult author David Keenan’s most mature, magical and profoundly realised novel yet, centred on a young boy in Glasgow
‘A challenging, unconventional and daring piece of fiction ‘ THE INDEPENDENT
‘Blending emotional sincerity with pulpy pastiche’ THE SUNDAY TIMES
‘Psychedelic post-punk fantasia’ THE HERALD
‘A swaggeringly imaginative, polyphonic novel’ THE SCOTSMAN
Boyhood opens in 1979 with the abduction of a young boy outside a Glasgow football ground. Nine years later, the boy’s brother, Aaron Murray, is on the cusp of that moment when adolescence becomes adulthood. His own journey of grief and recovery has been guided by an angel, ‘The Precious Gift’ – perhaps imagined, perhaps real – who has blessed Aaron with redemptive, messianic powers. These have enabled him to see through the past and present, joining the dots between a vast array of characters; ballerinas, soldiers, poets, burlesque dancers, East End gangsters and the Vampire of Derry over five decades, all tied up in each other’s fate.
As Aaron’s visions span cities and decades, from wartime Paris to the Troubles in the 1970s, Mexico City in the 1980s to – of course – Glasgow, Boyhood builds to an extraordinary, intense, climactic moment of redemption.
A book of great joy, of laughter in the face of horror and delight in storytelling by the beloved and critically acclaimed author of This Is Memorial Device, Boyhood is a hymn to the resilience of youth, to the brave dreams of artists and lovers and a love letter to Glasgow – a city where magic happens.
‘Slaps our dull, sterile culture hard across the face with a studded, uncompromising literary glove’ – IRVINE WELSH
‘Reading Keenan is like reclaiming your own imagination’ – LIAS SAOUDI
‘David Keenan is a wizard with words’ – BENJAMIN MYERS
‘Boyhood is a marvel. Impossible to sum up, it is a true novel, jumping with event and spectacle and showmanship – while speaking in its own extraordinary voice of tenderness and violence and pity and love, along with the gorgeous great fun and wonder of being alive’ – KIRSTY GUNN
‘A challenging, unconventional and daring piece of fiction ‘ THE INDEPENDENT
‘Blending emotional sincerity with pulpy pastiche’ THE SUNDAY TIMES
‘Psychedelic post-punk fantasia’ THE HERALD
‘A swaggeringly imaginative, polyphonic novel’ THE SCOTSMAN
Boyhood opens in 1979 with the abduction of a young boy outside a Glasgow football ground. Nine years later, the boy’s brother, Aaron Murray, is on the cusp of that moment when adolescence becomes adulthood. His own journey of grief and recovery has been guided by an angel, ‘The Precious Gift’ – perhaps imagined, perhaps real – who has blessed Aaron with redemptive, messianic powers. These have enabled him to see through the past and present, joining the dots between a vast array of characters; ballerinas, soldiers, poets, burlesque dancers, East End gangsters and the Vampire of Derry over five decades, all tied up in each other’s fate.
As Aaron’s visions span cities and decades, from wartime Paris to the Troubles in the 1970s, Mexico City in the 1980s to – of course – Glasgow, Boyhood builds to an extraordinary, intense, climactic moment of redemption.
A book of great joy, of laughter in the face of horror and delight in storytelling by the beloved and critically acclaimed author of This Is Memorial Device, Boyhood is a hymn to the resilience of youth, to the brave dreams of artists and lovers and a love letter to Glasgow – a city where magic happens.
‘Slaps our dull, sterile culture hard across the face with a studded, uncompromising literary glove’ – IRVINE WELSH
‘Reading Keenan is like reclaiming your own imagination’ – LIAS SAOUDI
‘David Keenan is a wizard with words’ – BENJAMIN MYERS
‘Boyhood is a marvel. Impossible to sum up, it is a true novel, jumping with event and spectacle and showmanship – while speaking in its own extraordinary voice of tenderness and violence and pity and love, along with the gorgeous great fun and wonder of being alive’ – KIRSTY GUNN
Reviews
Astonishing. With every new Keenan book, it's like he's rewriting literature and the reader's brain. He's a genius
Boyhood is a marvel. Impossible to sum up, it is a true novel, jumping with event and spectacle and showmanship - while speaking in its own extraordinary voice of tenderness and violence and pity and love, along with the gorgeous great fun and wonder of being alive. David Keenan claims the poetic tradition of Mallarme and Apollinaire and Rimbaud and makes it his own, lighting up the streets and nights of his story in syntax that cracks and melds and conjoins, and demands the reader slow down and take in the sound and rhythm of sentences and phrases as though learning to speak them for ourselves. This is the literature of the flaneur, the surrealist, the wide-awake dreamer and myth maker made new. Singing with the passion of ideas, of reading, learning, music, the magic of a richly furnished imagination and the wonder of ritual, all formally, fully, made up and brought together - so many lives, so many dramas, deaths, loves - this is a book that was an experience I never wanted to end
I didn't think it was possible to be this impressed, challenged and entertained by a novel. Boyhood is a complete triumph. Set in locations our art now fears to go, almost every page is stuffed with amazing ideas and vibrant characters, many dripping with sexuality and ominous menace. More than this, it slaps our dull, sterile culture hard across the face with a studded, uncompromising literary glove. We have the duty and privilege of rising up to its challenge and turning those pages. The alternative is to seriously miss out
Few writers can match the intensity and ambition of David Keenan. Boyhood is a novel of incredible contrasts, of friendship and grief and poetry and pain; it is a dark and dreamy song to the beauty of Glasgow and everyone in it. Fly through it and be changed!
David Keenan is a wizard with words, each fresh work a new spell cast out across the cosmos. There's no-one else quite like him. How could there be?
You end the book feeling that the ground beneath you isn't as solid as you previously believed . . . [Boyhood] should see Keenan recognised as among the most gifted authors working today
Boyhood is a curious mash-up of crime thriller, black farce and metaphysical parable . . . Its eccentric register, blending emotional sincerity with pulpy pastiche, compels and confounds
Keenan consistently blurs the roles of voyeur, guardian and storyteller in a complex, multi-threaded structure that, while centred on 1980s Glasgow, flits freely between numerous locations in time and space . . . A psychedelic post-punk fantasia dense with literary allusions and esoteric lore - not to mention his fierce love for the city in which it's set
A vertiginously wild ride from one of ScotLit's most unfettered imaginations . . . a swaggeringly imaginative, polyphonic novel
A wild-hearted secret history of the twentieth century, with an occult Glasgow at its dark heart. Keenan is a magician, conjuring a world of poetry, murder, obsession and love, where nothing is real and everything matters
With a true, stylish flourish, Keenan creates a sprawling, multilayered, almost modern picaresque novel that celebrates the wildness of Glasgow and the creative, anarchic language of Glaswegians . . . a challenging, unconventional and daring piece of fiction'
Like living inside a spell unfolding as time collapses and is rebuilt in startling new patterns. David Keenan finds poetry in the dirt and darkness, and beauty in the absurd. A remarkable and moving book
Reading Keenan is like reclaiming your own imagination. Writing that doesn't just remind you - but insists belligerently over and over again - everything is possible, everything MUST be possible
Within the great canon of Scottish literature, David Keenan once again proves himself to be a unique and spellbinding voice. He's creating music here, savage, human and unexpected. It's a joy to read
If free jazz was fiction . . . Exhilarating and ambitious, fizzing with the possibilities of fiction, dense with allusion and drunk on a strange dreamlike magic, Boyhood could be hailed as extraordinary if extraordinary wasn't by now par for the course for Keenan
Cutting a clear route through the sensory jungle is Keenan's love for his home city, soaked into every page . . . exhilarating and overwhelming in equal measure
David Keenan is a literary pilgrim tearing off the shopworn vestments of Scottish literature in a vital, inspirational, act of reincarnation that we should champion. In Boyhood he has found transport for his vision in oracles, horses and angels, that will carry you laughing, spinning, swinging, madly across his singular brilliant burning sun. A glorious wild trip of a novel
Boyhood is magnificent: a multilayered, constantly turning Dreamachine of Celtic comradeship, modernist revelation and Burroughsian time-bending espionage. Another total gem from the High Priest of the 21st century literary counterculture: a brilliantly unconventional murder mystery that, in its search for perpetrators of violence, ultimately uncovers the rejuvenating power of love, brotherhood and poetry