Runt
Published on 3. April 2008
Book
Paperback/Softback
160 pages
978-0-09-946115-9 (ISBN)
Description
On leaving school a sixteen-year-old boy goes to live with his uncle on a remote Welsh hill-farm. His aunt has recently committed suicide after losing her livestock in the foot-and-mouth epidemic and his uncle has turned, once again, to the bottle. The boy is a spiritual savant: an unwitting repository of folk memory from the margins, barely educated but possessed of extraordinary insights; barely literate but able to speak a language of his own - a poetry laden with Pagan and Christian myth.
He is unaware that he is gifted and unaware of what he knows. But during one of his ecstatic trances, the boy learns that he has an appointed role in the world, which he must discover for himself. During an episode of brutal and climactic violence, he does exactly that.
Told through the boy's internal monologue of beauty and damage, Runt is a powerful, disturbing and moving novel that reinvigorates the language of fiction and illuminates domestic tragedy with a penetrating epic light.
He is unaware that he is gifted and unaware of what he knows. But during one of his ecstatic trances, the boy learns that he has an appointed role in the world, which he must discover for himself. During an episode of brutal and climactic violence, he does exactly that.
Told through the boy's internal monologue of beauty and damage, Runt is a powerful, disturbing and moving novel that reinvigorates the language of fiction and illuminates domestic tragedy with a penetrating epic light.
Reviews / Votes
The writing leaps off the page...it throws up something so original and striking that it takes up permanent residence in a reader's head -- Tim Martin * Daily Telegraph * Runt is a bungee-jump plummet from modern sophistication into something lurking below, where fantasy takes flesh and ancient knowledge prevails -- Jennie Renton * Sunday Herald * Runt deserves the hackneyed description 'tour de force' ... it demonstrates Griffiths, a gritty realist, in complete command of the dark despairing gloop that so often smothers human lives -- Tom Adair * Scotsman * You would have to go back to Thomas Hardy to find a British writer who evokes a landscape so completely * Time Out * Evolutionary psychology meets mythology in this short, strange, savage novel... Niall Griffiths's prose enchants you * Guardian * The troubled teenager's tall tale spills out in a syntax-defying stream of consciousness that is at once liltingly innocent yet seeded with profundity * Sunday Times * Griffiths excels in exuberant and experimental portraits of marginals. He does not disappoint with this linguistically inventive portrait * Financial Times * As ever with Griffiths, this is bleak and violent, sometimes bitterly political stuff peppered with absurdly funny moments * Independent on Sunday * [It has a] visionary simplicity and mythic sense of place -- Caroline McGinn * Times Literary Supplement * Niall Griffiths is unrivalled as the literary voice of contemporary Wales... He mixes gritty realism with myth, poetry and regular doses of bone-cracking violence -- Jonathan Gibbs * Metro *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Vintage Publishing
Product notice
Paperback (UK-B)
Dimensions
Height: 198 mm
Width: 129 mm
Thickness: 11 mm
Weight
117 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-09-946115-9 (9780099461159)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Niall Griffiths was born in Liverpool in 1966 and now lives in Wales. He has published the novels: Grits, Sheepshagger, Kelly + Victor, Stump, Wreckage, and A Great Big Shining Star. The film of Kelly + Victor was released in 2012.