Skippy Dies

Paul Murray's Skippy Dies is a tragicomic masterpiece about a Dublin boarding school. Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010. Ruprecht Van Doren is an overweight genius whose hobbies include very difficult maths and the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Daniel '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 official school psychopath. A tragic comedy of epic sweep and dimension, Skippy Dies explores the corners of the human heart with pathos, humour, and hopelessness—covering topics like life, love, Robert Graves, mermaids, M-theory, and more. Critics have praised it as a brilliant, humane, and touching comic epic, and one of the finest comic novels written anywhere.