Author: Tim Duquenne
Too good to leave on the shelf.
After a year-long hiatus, Verdant and White Rabbit Books are officially bringing back the Beer & Book Club, your bi-monthly dose of fresh independent beer and literature.
Every two months, subscribers will receive six beers, alongside a hand-picked White Rabbit Books title. To make this relaunch extra special, we’ll only be shipping the newest books, fresh off the press, taking the conversation far beyond the screen. You’ll be invited to join live in-person events, online Q&As with authors and brewers, and dedicated book club episodes which will be available on Brewing Folk radio.
Our inaugural relaunch box is available now and will start shipping on September 1st. Who better to kick us off than David Keenan with his latest novel: Boyhood. Written by the critically acclaimed author behind This Is Memorial Device, Boyhood is an intense, joyful, and redemptive hymn to resilience and storytelling. A euphoric, time-bending love letter to Glasgow and youth described by Irvine Welsh as “a complete triumph.”
Head over to our webshop to secure your box as a one-off purchase or sign up for a subscription today!
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About the book:
Boyhood opens in 1979 with the abduction of a young boy outside a Glasgow football ground. Nine years later, the boy's brother, Aaron Murray, is on the cusp of that moment when adolescence becomes adulthood. His own journey of grief and recovery has been guided by an angel, 'The Precious Gift' - perhaps imagined, perhaps real - who has blessed Aaron with redemptive, messianic powers. These have enabled him to see through the past and present, joining the dots between a vast array of characters; ballerinas, soldiers, poets, burlesque dancers, East End gangsters and the Vampire of Derry over five decades, all tied up in each other's fate.
As Aaron's visions span cities and decades, from wartime Paris to the Troubles in the 1970s, Mexico City in the 1980s to - of course - Glasgow, Boyhood builds to an extraordinary, intense, climactic moment of redemption.
A book of great joy, of laughter in the face of horror and delight in storytelling by the beloved and critically acclaimed author of This Is Memorial Device, Boyhood is a hymn to the resilience of youth, to the brave dreams of artists and lovers and a love letter to Glasgow - a city where magic happens.
About David Keenan:
David Keenan was born in Glasgow and grew up in Airdrie, in the west of Scotland, in the late-70s and early-1980s. He is the author of seven novels, the cult classic This Is Memorial Device (Faber & Faber), which won the London Magazine Award for Debut Fiction 2018 and was shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, For The Good Times (Faber & Faber), which won the Gordon Burn Prize and was shortlisted for the Encore Award for Second Novels, Xstabeth/The Towers The Fields The Transmitters (White Rabbit), which was listed for the Dublin Literary Prize, the monolithic modernist masterpiece Monument Maker (White Rabbit) (about which the TLS urged readers to "sit back and marvel") and 2022's Industry of Magic & Light (White Rabbit) ("Keenan has written another classic" - The Scotsman).
His latest novel is Boyhood (White Rabbit), which Irvine Welsh described as "a complete triumph." He is also the author of England's Hidden Reverse (Strange Attractor Press), a history of the UK's post-punk/Industrial underground and Volcanic Tongue (White Rabbit) which collects the best of his music writing, as well as To Run Wild In It and Empty Aphrodite, (Rough Trade Books), two experimental novellas, and the co-designer, alongside Sophy Hollington, of his own tarot pack, the Autonomic Tarot (Rough Trade Books). Edna O'Brien said about him: "I sometimes think David Keenan dreams aloud. His prose has the effortless, enigmatic, unsettling quality of dream."
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