We meet Shy as he prepares to abscond in the night, his rucksack crammed with flints, and follow him for the next three hours of his life as his head seethes with anger, sadness, regret and confusion and with the drum and bass music that he adores. After Grief came Lanny, a joyous piece of pastoral writing in which a small boy navigates his way through life with Dead Papa Toothwort, an ancient forest spirit, always hovering in the wings.īoth novels – compressed, lyrical, fragmentary – are explorations of innocence and experience, of childhood and maturity and of the talismans, literal and metaphorical, we gather to us for the journey. Shy is the last of a trilogy that began with Grief is the Thing with Feathers, a Ted Hughes-inflected meditation on loss and how to survive it that was adapted into a mesmerising stage play by Enda Walsh, which starred Cillian Murphy as both a bereaved husband and father and the giant, deep-throated crow who embodied his distress. While he talks about his fondness for how the sweetie dispensers’ “rampant kitsch” combines with an impressive design quality and makes me laugh by describing how he paid one of his three sons hard cash to Blu-tack them all precisely to their display cabinet so that they didn’t tumble when the front door slammed, I’m struck by how helpful his passion for collecting and the objects of his zeal are in considering his novels. “Every single one of them is chosen because I find it charming or beautiful,” he explains, “because you can buy bulkloads of them on the internet but you’ve got to fall in love.” There are the tiny, beautifully detailed items of dolls’ house furniture the pile of stones on his mantelpiece that forms the start of a miniature drystone walling project and, primus inter pares, his array of Pez dispensers, his oldest and most treasured collection.

Max Porter is taking me on a tour of his house that, because he is in Somerset and I am in Kilkenny, necessitates him picking up his laptop and angling it towards the collections that are his pride and joy.

Books by max porter