Looked forward to this being released knowing that the writing would not disappoint. Being able to jump feet first into this boys life for a few short hours was going to offer both nostalgia and new experiences was a treat waiting to happen. I was not disappointed, hooked from the get go and exhausted by the close. The structure is intriguing and allows your brain to dart around in thoughts while you follow shy. Treat yourself read this lyrical dance of a book

Shamefully for a professional bookseller, this was my first encounter with Max Porter. I get it. What a writer this man is; inventive, nuanced, artful. But what struck me most was the colossal empathy he has for people, and his ability to convey the sometime tortured (and torturing) thoughts that can lead lives to ruin. He shows you how an unwell mind can lead to deepening darkness, and how an uncaring or unwilling society can leave no choice ahead of you but a final black finality. Meaning drops away, it hold no comfort. Just pain, confusion and the one way to can be made to stop. He demonstrates beautifully how each step downwards was the only choice available, how easy it is to fall. It's a remarkable marriage of craft and sensitivity.

Literary genius honestly. An extremely traumatized and troubled young man walks into the night with a bag full of rocks strapped to his back. You really feel for Shy the more you come to understand him, especially as you watch those close to him being unable to do so for themselves. That classic Max Porter surrealism flows through the whole novel, think I have dog-eared every other page for quote saving purposes at this point. The playful typography makes a comeback and the pacing of the novel is done with such a deft hand, it feels like reading one of Shy's drum and bass tracks. The level of empathy this evoked was incredible, I could talk about this book for hours on end, absolutely cannot wait to read it again.

This probably the most straightforwardly a novel of Porter's three full 'novels' so far. However, that only goes to show that, even without his alterations to typeface and structure, his work speaks for itself. (Review copy provided by the wonderful folks at Faber)

Max Porter’s magical (in all sense) “Lanny” was one of my favourite books of 2019 (alongside Ali Smith’s “Spring”) and should have gone much further than it did in the Booker Prize. This his latest novel, while perhaps not quite as distinctive, is still of a standard to put most authors to shame and combines his Lanny-like tendency to allow his poetic prose to spill over the page, and his ability (like in his debut “ A Grief Is A Thing With Feathers” to convey a whole life in just over 100 generously spaced pages. The book is set around 1995 – Shy is a troubled teenager “Failed 11+. Expelled from two schools. First caution 1992 aged thirteen. First arrest aged 15” who has been moved to Last Chance, an “unconventional” school which aims to rehabilitate “some of the most disturbed and violent young offenders in the country” but which faces an uncertain future as the owner of the old house in which it is based is looking for permission to convert It into “luxury self-contained flats”. The book is set over a few hours – beginning at 3.13 am, as Shy quietly escapes the house, carrying a rucksack full of rocks (his intentions unclear but as written by an author who is redefining the stream-of-consciousness novel to look at typeface and text placement alongside language – I immediately was drawn, I think not incorrectly, to Virginia Woolf’s fate). We are in Shy’s head and it is a veritable jumble of different threads: the Jungle music which he loves; his banter-filled interaction with his fellow Last Chance pupils; memories of his early sexual encounters; his memories and impressions of the various incidents which lead to his suspensions, cautions and arrests; dialogue from his sessions with a counsellor Jenny, some drawing on written reflections from his Mum on their relationship; more confrontational interactions with another teacher; excerpts from a promotional video and/or documentary about the school; some two page sections threaded with reproaches from his well-meaning but despairing step-father Iain and so on. All of this is played out against his journey in a dark in a familiar landscape rendered different almost alien to him at nightime on his way to his seeming destination of a pond. If there is something which I think might initially disappoint Grief or Lanny fans it will be the absence of nature and magic – but this changes when he encounters two “bloated dead badgers” and returns to the house, lapsing into a dream where his consciousness is merged with that of the badgers and a imagined 1960s previous occupant of his room (Eve), before a conclusion which starts as literally shattering before ending with empathy and kindness. Ultimately this is a book which fulfills the hugely admirable manifesto Porter shared in a Guardian interview in 2019, firstly to “chafe against the risk-adverse tendency in realist contemporary British fiction” (he mentions Alan Garner as “probably the most important postwar British writer”) and secondly his suggestion that “I don’t think it is impossible to have books that are difficult or confront quite dark things or are uncomfortably honest about sexuality or whatever it is, while at the same time being fundamentally kindhearted or celebratory about the human condition.” )