---
product_id: 14349962
title: "Skippy Dies: A Novel"
price: "€ 51.29"
currency: EUR
in_stock: true
reviews_count: 13
url: https://www.desertcart.at/products/14349962-skippy-dies-a-novel
store_origin: AT
region: Austria
---

# Multiple literary award nominations 700 pages of immersive storytelling Authentic Dublin setting & cultural depth Skippy Dies: A Novel

**Price:** € 51.29
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## Summary

> 📖 Unlock the cult classic that’s rewriting coming-of-age—don’t miss the story everyone’s talking about!

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- **What is this?** Skippy Dies: A Novel
- **How much does it cost?** € 51.29 with free shipping
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## Key Features

- • **Timeless & Relatable:** A novel that blends humor, tragedy, and sharp social commentary—perfect for the thoughtful professional reader.
- • **Authentic Irish Vibes:** Feel the pulse of Dublin’s oldest Catholic boys’ school with vivid characters and socio-cultural insights.
- • **Award-Winning Acclaim:** Experience a Booker Prize and Costa Award shortlisted novel that defines a generation’s voice and angst.
- • **Epic Literary Journey:** Dive into nearly 700 pages of rich, darkly comic, and poignant coming-of-age drama that millennials can't put down.
- • **Complex Characters & Themes:** Navigate a cast that captures the raw realities of adolescence, from friendship betrayals to existential quests.

## Overview

Skippy Dies is a critically acclaimed, nearly 700-page novel by Paul Murray, shortlisted for major literary awards including the Booker Prize. Set in Dublin’s historic Seabrook College, it explores the tragic death of a teenager through a darkly comic and heartfelt narrative. The book delves into themes of adolescence, friendship, institutional failure, and Irish culture, making it a must-read for millennials seeking a profound yet entertaining literary experience.

## Description

From the author of THE BEE STING, a New York Times Top 10 Best Books of the Year and shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize. The bestselling and critically acclaimed novel from Paul Murray, Skippy Dies , shortlisted for the 2010 Costa Book Awards, longlisted for the 2010 Booker Prize, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Why does Skippy, a fourteen-year-old boy at Dublin's venerable Seabrook College, end up dead on the floor of the local doughnut shop? Could it have something to do with his friend Ruprecht Van Doren, an overweight genius who is determined to open a portal into a parallel universe using ten-dimensional string theory? Could it involve Carl, the teenage drug dealer and borderline psychotic who is Skippy's rival in love? Or could "the Automator"―the ruthless, smooth-talking headmaster intent on modernizing the school―have something to hide? Why Skippy dies and what happens next is the subject of this dazzling and uproarious novel, unraveling a mystery that links the boys of Seabrook College to their parents and teachers in ways nobody could have imagined. With a cast of characters that ranges from hip-hop-loving fourteen-year-old Eoin "MC Sexecutioner" Flynn to basketball playing midget Philip Kilfether, packed with questions and answers on everything from Ritalin, to M-theory, to bungee jumping, to the hidden meaning of the poetry of Robert Frost, Skippy Dies is a heartfelt, hilarious portrait of the pain, joy, and occasional beauty of adolescence, and a tragic depiction of a world always happy to sacrifice its weakest members. As the twenty-first century enters its teenage years, this is a breathtaking novel from a young writer who will come to define his generation.

Review: One of the best I've read this year. - If you're looking for a really good book to read, this is the one. Don't just add it to your TBR pile...go get a copy and read it. It's nearly 700 pages, but you won't even notice, especially if you buy it in the 3-box set. It is undoubtedly one of the funniest books I've ever read, but at the same time, quite poignant; it is a book that will at times tug at your heartstrings. The story begins in the first book, called "Hopeland," and continues through the next two books, "Heartland" and "Ghostland." In the very first scene at Ed's Doughnut House on a Friday evening in November, 14-year old Skippy, whose real name is Daniel Juster, is having a doughnut-eating race with his friend Ruprecht Van Doren, who boasts that he has not been beaten in "fifteen consecutive races." But something goes wrong and (this is not a spoiler) Skippy dies after leaving the words "Tell Lori" written in jam filling on the floor. And then the author takes his readers back to fall term at Seabrook College, the oldest Catholic boys' school in Ireland -- to find out exactly what brought things to this point. Skippy is a student who boards at Seabrook. Until just shortly before midterm, Skippy had been an excellent student, is on the school's swim team, and generally liked, but his grades have been falling recently. Skippy enjoys playing a video game called "Hopeland," a kind of mystic quest, which will increase in importance as the story goes on. He shares a room with Ruprecht, whose goal is to study at Stanford, and has a lab in the basement where he conducts experiments which he hopes will lead him to the secret origins of the universe. Skippy's other friends include Dennis, who is an "arch-cynic, whose very dreams are sadistic, hates the world and everything in it..." He also has Geoff, Niall and Mario as friends, although these characters (and many of the other boys around Skippy) are really less developed as characters than Ruprecht and Dennis. After thinking he sees a UFO one day, Skippy looks through Ruprecht's telescope and sees a girl throwing a Frisbee. This is Lori, a girl from St. Brigid's, a "smoking-hot" girl who immediately captures Skippy's attention. The problem is that another Seabrook boy, Barry, has become infatuated with Lori, and Barry is bad news. But this book is not just about the boys of Seabrook -- the school's faculty and staff are just as much a part of the story. One of the main characters is Howard Fallon, the school's history teacher, who himself graduated from Seabrook some ten years back, and is haunted by an episode from his past. There's Father Green, the French teacher, whose name the boys have translated into French as "Pere-vert". His calling, as he sees it, is to snuff out sin, but at the same time, he feels he must keep Skippy in a state of innocence. He has his own inner demons to deal with as well. Then there's Greg Costigan, the acting principal of Seabrook in the absence of Father Furlong, who has suffered a recent heart attack. Costigan is snarkily referred to as "the Automator," and believes that the Paraclete Order is on its last legs, and that the only solution is to modernize the school, with himself at the helm. He believes that Seabrook's history as the oldest Catholic boys' school is brandable -- and that the school's role is to prepare the students to "get up there on the world stage and duke it out with the best of them." He wants to roll with the times and represents progress in a very anti-traditionalist sort of way; he doesn't care that the boys actually learn anything, just that they pass their exams to continue Seabrook's reputation, come what may. The reputation of the school is everything and must remain so, no matter what. Fallon, on the other hand, begins to understand that history is something of value -- and that teaching others to care about the past may be just as important as throwing them into the competitive capitalist arena. Although Skippy Dies is often so funny you can't help but laugh out loud (for example, there's a scene where the boys' English teacher has just gone over the meaning of Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" and one of the kids takes his interpretation to a whole new level), the story is at times tragic and heartbreaking. It's a good look at how these teenagers understand and interpret themselves in the face of today's world (including sex and drug use) how they see adults, and how despair can cause loss of hope and yet for some, become a building experience. It's about the hold of memory on the human psyche and the importance of remembering. There are other themes at work as well -- including the socio-economic situation of modern Ireland and the role of the Catholic church in the face of all of the scandals that dog it -- making this very long book just fly by. I loved this book. Absolutely. It's extremely well written, although it does get bogged down a bit for a short time in the middle. But on the whole, it is most excellent. I have absolutely zero qualms about recommending it. It is so good you will not be able to stop reading it. I really hope it becomes a runaway bestseller.
Review: Darkly comic, uplifting nihilism... that kind of thing. - Plenty of plot summaries already exist for this energetic tragicomedy set among the handful of boarders at a Dublin Catholic school - no need to write another recap of the huge cast of odd characters or the twisty road that takes them through the death of a classmate. Skippy Dies reads much shorter than its nearly 700 pages... Murray has a feel for pacing. More importantly, he has a strong sense of these early-teen boys - neither sympathetic nor damning, he captures their easy cruelty and flitting loyalties and ceaseless search for a sense of self. He reflects their casual drug abuse and hormone-fueled dramatic antics without commenting on them; they are, for the author and his characters, simply realities of adolescence. His judgment, then, is reserved for the adults who are unable or unwilling to shed that self-involvement. Without exception, these adults are deeply flawed - sometimes sympathetically so, but no less irredeemably. Paul Murray is a bit too on the nose when he digresses into World-War-I rantings about the betrayals of institutions and the unfairness of history, but the point remains: parents, teachers, governments and schools are plagued by their own self-involvement. In the end, this is a broadly cautionary tale: place no faith in assumed friendships or imposed leaders - both will betray you. For this heavy backdrop, however, Murray has a light touch. The teens' interactions are deft and charming, even when they are cruel. Skippy Dies is the finest kind of page-turner, one built of its own momentum and powered by compelling characters instead of artificial cliffhangers. Murray doesn't mock or satirize his characters, but he cloaks their darkness in daylight. He reminds us that of that moment where we each realized that teenage angst is universal, that we were both bullied and bullies, and that the insecurity we felt was the reflection of the insecurity we created in others. His Dublin can be lonely and can be funny, but mostly it is familiar.

## Features

- Used Book in Good Condition

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #114,211 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #1,773 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books) #3,698 in Literary Fiction (Books) |
| Customer Reviews | 4.2 out of 5 stars 2,770 Reviews |

## Images

![Skippy Dies: A Novel - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81HtleDjksL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ One of the best I've read this year.
*by N***O on September 8, 2010*

If you're looking for a really good book to read, this is the one. Don't just add it to your TBR pile...go get a copy and read it. It's nearly 700 pages, but you won't even notice, especially if you buy it in the 3-box set. It is undoubtedly one of the funniest books I've ever read, but at the same time, quite poignant; it is a book that will at times tug at your heartstrings. The story begins in the first book, called "Hopeland," and continues through the next two books, "Heartland" and "Ghostland." In the very first scene at Ed's Doughnut House on a Friday evening in November, 14-year old Skippy, whose real name is Daniel Juster, is having a doughnut-eating race with his friend Ruprecht Van Doren, who boasts that he has not been beaten in "fifteen consecutive races." But something goes wrong and (this is not a spoiler) Skippy dies after leaving the words "Tell Lori" written in jam filling on the floor. And then the author takes his readers back to fall term at Seabrook College, the oldest Catholic boys' school in Ireland -- to find out exactly what brought things to this point. Skippy is a student who boards at Seabrook. Until just shortly before midterm, Skippy had been an excellent student, is on the school's swim team, and generally liked, but his grades have been falling recently. Skippy enjoys playing a video game called "Hopeland," a kind of mystic quest, which will increase in importance as the story goes on. He shares a room with Ruprecht, whose goal is to study at Stanford, and has a lab in the basement where he conducts experiments which he hopes will lead him to the secret origins of the universe. Skippy's other friends include Dennis, who is an "arch-cynic, whose very dreams are sadistic, hates the world and everything in it..." He also has Geoff, Niall and Mario as friends, although these characters (and many of the other boys around Skippy) are really less developed as characters than Ruprecht and Dennis. After thinking he sees a UFO one day, Skippy looks through Ruprecht's telescope and sees a girl throwing a Frisbee. This is Lori, a girl from St. Brigid's, a "smoking-hot" girl who immediately captures Skippy's attention. The problem is that another Seabrook boy, Barry, has become infatuated with Lori, and Barry is bad news. But this book is not just about the boys of Seabrook -- the school's faculty and staff are just as much a part of the story. One of the main characters is Howard Fallon, the school's history teacher, who himself graduated from Seabrook some ten years back, and is haunted by an episode from his past. There's Father Green, the French teacher, whose name the boys have translated into French as "Pere-vert". His calling, as he sees it, is to snuff out sin, but at the same time, he feels he must keep Skippy in a state of innocence. He has his own inner demons to deal with as well. Then there's Greg Costigan, the acting principal of Seabrook in the absence of Father Furlong, who has suffered a recent heart attack. Costigan is snarkily referred to as "the Automator," and believes that the Paraclete Order is on its last legs, and that the only solution is to modernize the school, with himself at the helm. He believes that Seabrook's history as the oldest Catholic boys' school is brandable -- and that the school's role is to prepare the students to "get up there on the world stage and duke it out with the best of them." He wants to roll with the times and represents progress in a very anti-traditionalist sort of way; he doesn't care that the boys actually learn anything, just that they pass their exams to continue Seabrook's reputation, come what may. The reputation of the school is everything and must remain so, no matter what. Fallon, on the other hand, begins to understand that history is something of value -- and that teaching others to care about the past may be just as important as throwing them into the competitive capitalist arena. Although Skippy Dies is often so funny you can't help but laugh out loud (for example, there's a scene where the boys' English teacher has just gone over the meaning of Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" and one of the kids takes his interpretation to a whole new level), the story is at times tragic and heartbreaking. It's a good look at how these teenagers understand and interpret themselves in the face of today's world (including sex and drug use) how they see adults, and how despair can cause loss of hope and yet for some, become a building experience. It's about the hold of memory on the human psyche and the importance of remembering. There are other themes at work as well -- including the socio-economic situation of modern Ireland and the role of the Catholic church in the face of all of the scandals that dog it -- making this very long book just fly by. I loved this book. Absolutely. It's extremely well written, although it does get bogged down a bit for a short time in the middle. But on the whole, it is most excellent. I have absolutely zero qualms about recommending it. It is so good you will not be able to stop reading it. I really hope it becomes a runaway bestseller.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Darkly comic, uplifting nihilism... that kind of thing.
*by M***R on April 13, 2012*

Plenty of plot summaries already exist for this energetic tragicomedy set among the handful of boarders at a Dublin Catholic school - no need to write another recap of the huge cast of odd characters or the twisty road that takes them through the death of a classmate. Skippy Dies reads much shorter than its nearly 700 pages... Murray has a feel for pacing. More importantly, he has a strong sense of these early-teen boys - neither sympathetic nor damning, he captures their easy cruelty and flitting loyalties and ceaseless search for a sense of self. He reflects their casual drug abuse and hormone-fueled dramatic antics without commenting on them; they are, for the author and his characters, simply realities of adolescence. His judgment, then, is reserved for the adults who are unable or unwilling to shed that self-involvement. Without exception, these adults are deeply flawed - sometimes sympathetically so, but no less irredeemably. Paul Murray is a bit too on the nose when he digresses into World-War-I rantings about the betrayals of institutions and the unfairness of history, but the point remains: parents, teachers, governments and schools are plagued by their own self-involvement. In the end, this is a broadly cautionary tale: place no faith in assumed friendships or imposed leaders - both will betray you. For this heavy backdrop, however, Murray has a light touch. The teens' interactions are deft and charming, even when they are cruel. Skippy Dies is the finest kind of page-turner, one built of its own momentum and powered by compelling characters instead of artificial cliffhangers. Murray doesn't mock or satirize his characters, but he cloaks their darkness in daylight. He reminds us that of that moment where we each realized that teenage angst is universal, that we were both bullied and bullies, and that the insecurity we felt was the reflection of the insecurity we created in others. His Dublin can be lonely and can be funny, but mostly it is familiar.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ The Book of the Century
*by T***O on May 6, 2012*

The book of the century for me is Skippy Dies by the Irish Author, Paul Murray. (I am aware that the century is still young, but I am not, and so I have to get my vote in early.) The story takes place in the present at a small private school, Seabrook Academy, on the outskirts of Dublin. The school is run by the Paraclete Fathers, a dying community of missionary and teaching priests. As there are only a handful of aging and ailing priests left, the school is gradually being taken over by an ambitious lay administrator. The story revolves around a dozen students and an equal number of faculty and old boys. There are also two girls who get into the act, students at St. Bridgits, the sister academy which is tantalizingly close (just across a courtyard from the boys' dorm) but light years away. Murray's humor is everywhere. It's a kind of Bob and Ray humor that builds up comic tension in you but seldom lets you laugh out loud to relieve it. What's humorous here is half situational and half in the quirky characters you come to care about. Yet neither the situations nor the characters seem exaggerated. In spite of the humor, this book is dead serious. It's not alternately serious and funny; it's serious throughout, and its humor stems from the awfulness that creeps over you as the author reels you in. The book is upsetting and infuriating: you want to leap into the school and get involved yourself. The most striking feature of Murray's writing is the continual invention. The book is forever steering you off in a direction that you never saw coming, but only a few pages later you know it was simply inevitable. I'm not sure quite how the author pulls this off, but it happens again and again. For example, the book comes to a perfectly satisfying conclusion about halfway through, but there are still all those pages to go. And a hundred pages later you understand that the seemingly satisfying conclusion of the midpoint simply wouldn't have been up to the standard of this gifted writer. Toward the very end, Murray introduces the story of D Company of Dublin's Royal Fusiliers who fought in the First World War. Ireland was not directly involved in the war, but the Brits recruited there and raised a number of companies of volunteers. D Company was made up largely of Rugby players from the club system; they were joining in groups -- sometimes entire teams -- eager for adventure. The company was called the Dublin Pals. Though they expected to serve on the Western Front, they were shipped off to Gallipoli with less than two weeks of training, and there they were massacred along with the Australians and New Zealanders in one of Churchill's worst ever miscalculations. The few who came home arrived in the middle of the Risings, and instead of treating them as heroes the Irish thought them traitors. After all, they'd fought in the service of Britain. It's an upsetting story by itself; woven as it is into Skippy Dies it becomes something else entirely. I was intrigued enough about Paul Murray to track down and read his first book, An Evening of Long Goodbyes. That one was less obviously brilliant. It was amusing but only modestly engaging. . . until the very end. When I closed the book I concluded that I wasn't merely engaged but captivated. Again, I'm not sure how Murray had managed to get to me, but he did. I chanced upon an interview with Paul Murray published shortly after An Evening of Long Goodbyes was nominated for the Whitbread Prize, and it gave something of hint about his magic. He said that Joyce and Beckett were his first author/heroes, but that Irish writers who came after them were averse to taking risks. And he continued: "By 'risks' here, I think I mean humor. What I love about Beckett is that one minute he can be dealing with grand existential themes and the next minute someone's pants fall down . . . . I don't think a book ought to be limited to one genre, as comedy or tragedy or whatever. Without wanting to get too grand about it, that's not the way life works, is it? It doesn't divide itself up neatly into humorous part, tragic part - it's more blurred than that. When things seem outwardly perfect, we can find ourselves despairing, and conversely, when things seem at their absolute most hopeless and desolate, we can find ourselves laughing at the silliest joke." The story of Skippy Dies is hopeless and desolate and you'll find yourself chuckling all the way through it.

## Frequently Bought Together

- Skippy Dies: A Novel
- The Bee Sting: A Novel
- An Evening of Long Goodbyes: A Novel

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