Skippy Dies

Paul Murray wrings every drop of humour and despair out of life, mermaids, M-theory, the poetry of Robert Graves and the mystery of the human heart.

Ruprecht Van Doren is an overweight genius whose hobbies include very difficult maths and the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. ‘Skippy’ Juster is his roommate. In the grand old Dublin institution that is Seabrook College for Boys, nobody pays either of them much attention. But when Skippy falls for Lori, the frisbee-playing siren from the girls’ school next door, suddenly all kinds of people take an interest. Including Carl, part-time drug-dealer and full-time school psychopath.

"The extravagantly entertaining Skippy Dies chronicles a single catastrophic autumn at Seabrook from a good 20 different perspectives: students, teachers, administrators, priests, girlfriends, doughnut shop managers... The ambitious length of Skippy Dies allows Murray to take on any number of fascinating themes. One of the great pleasures of this novel is how confidently he addresses such disparate topics as quantum physics, video games, early-20th-century mysticism, celebrity infatuation, drug dealing, Irish folklore and pornography … Murray confidently brings these strands together, knitting them into an energetic plot that concerns Skippy’s death -  and his roommates’ attempts to contact him afterward - but also expands into an elegy for lost youth."  -  Dan Kois, The New York Times Sunday Book Review

Paul Murray studied English at Trinity College Dublin, but it took a Catalan businessmen he was teaching in Barcelona to point out ‘the many faults in my grammar I had not known about hitherto’. Skippy Dies started as a short story but, he says, ‘I kept having more and more ideas’. It finally emerged as a 661-page novel published in three volumes.