Catherine flees from her native West Cork to Dublin, and the novel tells the story of her son, whose adoptive parents have named him Cyril Avery.īoyne perfectly captures the Irish national character and how it developed from the 1940s right through to the 21st Century. When the novel opens, it’s 1945, and we’re introduced to Catherine Goggin, a girl of sixteen, publicly banished from her community during Sunday morning Mass for the crime of being unmarried and pregnant. I was invested in Cyril’s story from the minute I met him, and Boyne succeeded in gently bringing me through the moments of joy and grief in his life as we would go through them with a dear friend. It’s been a month since I finished reading John Boyne’s latest novel, The Heart’s Invisible Furies, and I haven’t quite gotten over it yet.Ī radical statement, about a novel? Perhaps, but Boyne’s story and characters have remained with me and popped into my head many times over the past month, and the affection I feel for his protagonist, Cyril, is akin to something I would feel for a kind man I really knew.
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