The Boys

The Boys is a tremendous novel - compelling, vibrant, and dazzling. These characters are charming and hilarious and doing their best to get on. I worried for them and I loved them and I miss them now that they’re gone. Leo Robson writes with a dry hilarity and crackling intelligence. What an arrival. – Brandon Taylor, Booker shortlisted author of Real LifeWith a cast of maverick characters that all want the last word, The Boys is the kind of novel whose world you feel remorse at having to leave. It is many things: a comic come-along-for-the-ride; a moving exploration of how grief hits, shifts, evolves; a detective story behind understanding complicated feelings. It’s very human, very real but also, fundamentally, extremely fun to read. – Rebecca Watson, author of Little ScratchLeo Robson’s The Boys is written with such a brisk, charming sense of humour that you almost don’t notice how touching it is. There’s something delightful on every page. – Lauren Oyler, author of Fake AccountsTender and acerbic by turn, indisputably British, Leo Robson’s The Boys yields its secrets as particular pleasures to be acquired one by one; as if the reader, like the novel’s sharply observant narrator, were making their way through a labyrinth, entangled in familial wonders and revelations – Joyce Carol OatesFull of joyously messy characters and acute observations, The Boys is a brilliant and witty portrait of a family fractured across generations and continents. In the days after finishing the book, I found myself passing off its insights as though they were my own. – Joe DunthorneThe Boys is a London novel, site specific, exact in its textures. Its protagonist is a born noticer. He is both lonely and sociable, needy and self-contained. Summer days and new relationships are rendered with a grace that is lyrical at times but also ironic and comic, in a tone perfectly-pitched. – Colm Tóibín

Leo Robson is a journalist. He is a contributing editor at Granta and assistant editor at Literary Review. His writing on culture and sport has appeared in a wide range of publications, including the New Statesman, the New Left Review, the London Review of Books, and the New Yorker. He lives in London.

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