Where Are the Kings

From Irish Book Award winner and Booker finalist Donal Ryan, a funny, tender novel about a young boy who comes of age amid the fallout from his mother’s death

Jack is just eleven years old when he bikes furiously down the hill after his mother’s car, desperate to reach her before she reaches the lake. What happens next cannot be undone.

Jack’s life changes forever just as he enters those pivotal years when he will transition from boy to man, when nothing makes sense at the best of times. Suddenly he is thrust into a family he’s never known: his mother’s parents, ferocious Nana and temperamental Grandad; her brothers, his gruff uncles Haulie and Theo and the irascible JJ, who’s young enough to be Jack’s cousin; and her sister Rose, whose mere presence ignites every atom in his changing body. Yet this big, chaotic, loveable family is hiding something from Jack—something about the mother who disappeared into the lake and the father who was institutionalized after her death. How can a boy with so many questions, in a family with so many secrets, understand the person he is becoming? Without his mother to ground him on earth, will Jack spin off into the stars?

A heartbreaking, wisecracking ode to family and the complexity of love, this novel is Donal Ryan’s most powerful and beautifully written story yet.