Max Porter - Sponsored by GWR

Max Porter’s astonishing novels are so original they’re hard to compare with anyone else’s and don’t fit readily into any genre or category. If there’s a uniting theme it’s extremity – characters pushed to breaking point – but what truly links his books is the relish with which he wrestles English and hands it back to us like a whole new language. He burst onto the reading world with Grief is a Thing With Feathers, followed with the no less breathtaking Lanny, in which the loss of an unworldly child brings out the best and worst in a commuter belt village. Then came The Death of Francis Bacon, a bravura piece of ventriloquism that was as much monologue as novel and now we have his fourth novel, Shy, portraying a few hours in the life of a troubled teenage boy. Max will be in conversation with Patrick Gale.