If Porter is a guitarist, this is him riffing. Letting us know that he can really shred. You get this sensation when reading his books of sound in the mouth, in the ears, and on the page - you can hear a live performance, it's visceral and at moments quite outstanding. If you've never read him before and you come to this- hold tight, gather round, listen in. All the beats he creates in his fiction pump around a heart, or central theme. In the Death of Francis Bacon this was Art. Grief was, well, Grief. Lanny felt obsessed with a couple of things: parenthood and green-sick Britain. In Shy, for the first time he really explores Violence. Specific, spontaneous, trigger-happy teenage violence. "The System". "Boys". "No-hope". Loneliness. We follow Shy who'd be described on a school disciplinary card as a troubled young man with complex mental health issues/ social needs - and all the rest of those disappointing, flat things that don't really mean anything. Porter is interested in the true shape, letting us wear the walkman, hide under the hood, chew the fingernails of this boy to see what really irks him, disturbs and moves him, what breaks him. He's also interested in tethering the reader to empathy, committed to finding those griphooks of tenderness amongst all of his flurrying breathless tale telling, and these lightbulb-like moments that blister through the dark are the moments that stop you in your tracks, make you take a deep breath, understand it all more, life and its people. Shy was sad, disturbing, funny then devastatingly warm, in that order. What a pleasure it is to dive into the UK mind and read the true nature of things. Urban concrete and cold ponds, windows smashing and badgers all feature in this unfortagettable HyperMix. I'll not tell you another inch of it. Do give it a read.  Dear Max, thank you and more please, always more. To Bea and our friends at Faber- thank you so much for the proof.

Porter’s novels find modern society lacking in so many ways and in Shy, as in Lanny and Grief is the Thing with Feathers, nature in all its fetid, malodorous glory fills the void. The reader joins Shy, a teenager that society can no longer cope with, as he packs a rucksack with heavy stones and walks into the night. He is running away from the behavioural unit and his own demons. As he runs he replays conversations, arguments, miscommunications, fights and the violence that have brought him to this point. The text is a stream of remembered lyrics, arguments, tv commentaries, counselling sessions and Shy’s own cacophony of thoughts and feelings. The nocturnal landscape although at first threatening to the teenager reveals itself to be fully present to his emotionally heightened state. Will it be enough to save him? Porter is a bold, brilliant combative writer who challenges us to step up both as a readers and humans in a society which increasingly cares less.

Shy takes place over a few hours of a troubled teenage boy as he reflects and tries to make convoluted sense of his past, present and future. Wandering in the night, he thinks back to conversations and turning points in his life involving the people who love him and the people he has hurt. Each of Porter’s books are intensely unique with the writing style and grammatical structure of Shy matching the protagonist’s dialect and adapting to their evolving mental state throughout the novel. It is quite a short book but packs a punch, with not a word wasted and each sentence conveying more information and emotion than many books do with a whole page. Sometimes hard to read I promise that by the end you won’t regret the time spent with this fantastic new story.

Porter's books are all strange little creations. Tiny, intricate novellas with such depth. You read a hundred pages and feel like you've travelled into someone's head and out the other side. This is what it's like to be in the head of a troubled young man called Shy. His thoughts are out of control. He doesn't know how to handle himself. The only things that allow him any respite from his own self destruction are drugs and music. Everything else is too out of control and sometimes even the drugs and music don't help. Shy is on his last ditch attempt to be 'saved' but doesn't think he's going to hack it and he's not even sure if he wants to. We follow him into the night and beyond. This is poetic, sad and strange. I loved it.

An emotionally challenging read, however Porter's writing is flawless as always. Takes a little time to get used to the formatting, but it will click eventually. As someone who had worked with students on the brink of being excluded from the educational system, this hit really hard. I could see aspects of my previous students so clearly in Shy. Definitely an important and insightful piece of literature.