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The Heart’s Invisible Furies
by John Boyne
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Ireland, 1945. Sixteen-year-old Catherine Goggin is expelled from her village after becoming pregnant outside marriage and gives birth in Dublin. Her son Cyril is adopted by the emotionally distant Avery family and grows up knowing that he is ‘not a real Avery’. As a gay boy and young man in a society governed by Catholic morality and criminal sanctions, Cyril learns concealment before he learns intimacy.
Across seven decades, Cyril’s life takes him through Dublin, Amsterdam and New York as Ireland changes around him. Friendship, exile, violence, the AIDS crisis and the gradual recognition of LGBTQ+ rights shape his attempts to build a family and reconcile with the circumstances of his birth. The novel uses one life to trace the decline of clerical social authority and the movement from shame and criminalisation towards greater legal and personal freedom.
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