The Heart's Invisible Furies (Hardback)

Long before we discovered that he had fathered two children by two different women, one in Drimoleague and one in Clonakilty, Father James Monroe stood on the altar of the Church of Our Lady, Star of the Sea, in the parish of Goleen, West Cork, and denounced my mother as a whore.

Cyril Avery is not a real Avery or at least that’s what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. But if he isn’t a real Avery, then who is he?

Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple (via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun) Cyril is adrift in the world, anchored only tenuously by his heartfelt friendship with the infinitely more glamourous and dangerous Julian Woodbead.

At the mercy of fortune and coincidence, he will spend a lifetime attempting to know himself and to discover where he came from – and over his three score years and ten, will struggle to discover an identity, a home, a country, a place of belonging.

In this, Boyne's most transcendent work to date, we are shown the story of Ireland from the 1940s to today through the eyes of one ordinary man. The Heart's Invisible Furies is a novel about the search for a sense of self in a changing world and the ultimate, redemptive power of the human spirit.

‘I ran through the whole range of human emotions while reading this brilliant novel. It's a masterpiece.’ - Cathy Rentzenbrink, author of The Last Act of Love

Irish author John Boyne is undoubtedly best-known for his powerful multi-award winning novel of The Holocaust, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. Writing for adults and children alike, his other works include The Absolutist, A History of Loneliness, Noah Barleywater Runs Away and The Boy At The Top Of The Mountain.