Skippy Dies - Grand Format

Why does skippy, a fourteen-year-old boy at Dublin's venerable Seabrook College, end up dead on the floor of the local doughnut shop ? Could it have something to do with his friend Ruprecht Van Doren, an overweight genius who is determined to open a portal into a parallel universe using ten-dimensional string theory ? Could it involve Carl, the teenage drug dealer and borderline psychotic who is Skippy's rival in love ? Or could "the Automator" - the ruthless, smooth-talking principal intent on modernizing the school - have something to hide ? Why Skippy dies and what happens next is the subject of this dazzling and uproarious novel, unraveling a mystery that links the boys of Seabrook College to their parents and teachers in ways nobody could have imagined.
With a cast of characters that ranges from the hip-hop-loving Eoin "MC Sexecutioner" Flynn to the basketball-playing midget Philip Kilfether, and packed with questions and answers an everything from Ritalin to M-theory to bungee jumping to the hidden meaning of the poetry of Robert Frost, Paul Murray's Skippy Dies is a heartfelt, hilarious portrait of the pain, joy, and occasional beauty of adolescence, and a tragic depiction of a world always happy to sacrifice its weakest members.
As the twenty-first century enters its teenage years, this is a breathtaking novel from a young writer who will come to define his generation.