Set on the coast of Ireland in the 1970s, 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

In Donegal, Ireland, 1973, a baby boy is found on the beach of a close-knit fishing village. After the baby has been carried through the crowd of onlookers, fisherman Ambrose Bonnar—a man of great bulk, and great heart—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 this family and this community, bookended by the arrival and departure of one mesmerizing boy. It charts, over the decades, the rise and fall of the family's fortunes—and the town's, because nothing happens to one family here that doesn't happen to them all—as the combined forces of a voracious global economy and modernized commercial fishing wreak havoc on their long-held 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.