The Boy from the Sea

A Novel

De: Garrett Carr

Narrado por: Stanley Townsend

Set on Ireland’s west coast in the 1970s and 80s, a captivating debut novel about a baby boy who is discovered on the beach beside a small fishing town, as told by the locals who fall under the boy’s transfixing spell.


"Compassionate, lyrical and full of devilment."—Louise Kennedy, author of Trespasses

Ireland 1973, a baby boy is found on the beach of a close-knit fishing village. Fisherman Ambrose Bonnar offers to bring the child into his own family: his son, Declan, wife, Christine, and up the lane, Christine's sister and aging father. The townspeople remain fascinated by the baby, now named Brendan, as he grows into a strange yet charismatic young man.

The Boy from the Sea tells the story of a family and community, all thrown into turmoil by Brendan’s arrival. The family's fortunes rise and fall over the years—as do the town's, because nothing happens to one family here that doesn't happen to them all—as the forces of a voracious global economy and modernized commercial fishing wreak havoc on their way of life. In the village, Brendan and Declan are wildly different and often wildly at odds; out on the sea, Ambrose worries about his children, but cannot afford to tear his attention from the brutal work that keeps his family afloat. As the world around them keeps changing, the mystery of one boy’s origins pulls them all toward a surprising, stormy fate.

Both outrageously funny and incredibly moving, The Boy from the Sea is a dazzling novel from a major new voice in Irish literature.

Real, raw, and wish it continued on

Each character has a very real way of being developed. I also want those huge trawlers to cease and desist so the life on the bottom of our oceans can recover.

A Rrespite

This is a comforting story about the kinds of people we each have known, no matter when or where life’s experiences have taken us. The reading and the story, the atmosphere, the heroic Ambrose, the steadfast wife and mom, the jealous brother, and the spiritual one who arrived in a barrel lined with tinfoil for protection and hope — the town and the times, the struggles and the strength of character: all of these things in this lovely novel are exactly what we need and we crave when the turbulence and the disappointments of our days make us long to return to normalcy remembered.