Please help me welcome Ciarán West, visiting us from the United Kingdom today! His first book, The Boys of Summer, was recently released and Ciarán has some fun ways of promoting his work. You can read more about him at his blogspot, http://onepercentperspiration.wordpress.com/. He is also on Twitter at https://twitter.com/CiaranWest and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/boysofsummerbook.
The Boys of Summer, by Ciarán West
"It’d
been boiling for weeks. Mam said last time we’d a summer like this was in 1977,
when she was pregnant with me. I used to wonder what she’s looked like; twelve
years younger, with a big belly on her. I seen pictures of her from before that,
when she was young; people used to say she was beautiful. She just looked like
Mam to me."
Well, because reviewers say this one is brilliant. When was the
last time you read a book that really gripped you from the start; held your
attention all the way through, and left you reeling at the end? A long time ago,
probably. That's because these days, anyone can write a book, but very few
people can write one properly. The Boys Of Summer is different. The characters
are real, the dialogue is authentic and the plot is as relentless as it is
clever.
So what's it about?
Ostensibly, it's about a killing that happens in
1989, in a close-knit estate in Limerick, Ireland. Really though, it's about
being eleven, friendship, love, romance and loyalty. It's about knowing who your
friends are, and finding out who your family are. It's about making choices and
living by them.
Who's in it, and why should we care?
The story is told through the eyes and words of
Richie South, a boy who's a little more bookish and well behaved than his peers,
and finds Growing Up to be rife with challenges and confrontations. We watch him
mature over a very short time, when faced with tough choices and horrific
events. We also watch him fall uncontrollably in love, with a girl who you
wouldn't take home to mother.
What is it reminiscent of, in your
opinion?
My big influences would be Stephen King and
Irvine Welsh; with very early Dean Koontz in there too. In a modern sense,
people have compared this to Emma Donoghue's Room and Mark Haddon's The
Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night Time. Comparisons which are both
flattering and fair, I think.
Why should we buy it, in a nutshell?
You should own this book because it's
unpretentious, it's written from the heart. The prose is spare, vital and not
littered with pointless adverbs or flowery, thesaurus-derived language. It's not
over-long or boring. It speaks to everyone who has ever been a child, no matter
where or when they grew up. And because it'll be the best thing you read all
year, self-published or not. I would bet my life on it. Go to Amazon, read the
first chapter and a half, and if you don't want to buy the book and read the
rest of it, then we'll part company as friends and never speak of this
again. Below is a short excerpt from the book between the main character and his mother:
"‘You know I love the bones of you, don’t you?’ She
turned off the gas under the kettle, cos it had started whistling.
‘Yeh-huh,’ I could feel a blush coming all over me,
and I didn’t want her to see it. I loved her too, but you couldn’t really say
it."
Where you can get the book now:
Are you writing another book now?
I am mainly promoting this one at the moment, rather than writing another one. I
have three clear ideas for grown-up novels, and another that I'm going to write
for the 8-11 yr old bracket, under a pen name. My daughter is nearly ten, and
the biggest reader I know, so I've promised her I'll write something appropriate
for her to read. I can't say much about the other ideas, other than that one of
them involves a fringe character from the first book, but we've flashed forward
to 1995, so it's another nostalgia-fest of sorts. And that one of the other
ideas involves the present day, London, and a lot of dread and peril!
I have to tell you, I love your videos. You have one in which you talk about your book in a funny mock interview (below) and two in which you talk about how to limerick correctly. I hope you do more!
Connect
with Ciarán!
