The Boys

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What to expect

'Summer days and new relationships are rendered with a grace that is lyrical at times but also ironic and comic, in a tone perfectly-pitched' Colm Tóibín
'Compelling, vibrant, and dazzling' Brandon Taylor, Booker shortlisted author of Real Life
'Very human, very real but also, fundamentally, extremely fun to read' Rebecca Watson, author of Little Scratch

A New Statesman 25 best books to read in 2025.

London, 2012. Johnny Voghel is stuck. He has a dead-end job at a small university and a wilting relationship and is grieving the death of his parents. When his half-brother Lawrence returns to the old family home from Chicago after a period of estrangement, Johnny decides to do everything he can to win back his affection. It's a quest he pursues with the help of Lawrence's childhood sweetheart and a pair of mysterious and seductive students adrift in the city during the height of Olympics fever.

A generational saga that takes place over a fortnight, and a comedy about confusion and loss, The Boys follows Johnny as he revisits old grievances, cultivates new friendships - and tries to take control of his fate.

Critics Review

The Boys is a tremendous novel - compelling, vibrant, and dazzling. These characters are charming and hilarious and doing their best to get on. I worried for them and I loved them and I miss them now that they're gone. Leo Robson writes with a dry hilarity and crackling intelligence. What an arrival.
Brandon Taylor, Booker shortlisted author of Real Life
With a cast of maverick characters that all want the last word, The Boys is the kind of novel whose world you feel remorse at having to leave. It is many things: a comic come-along-for-the-ride; a moving exploration of how grief hits, shifts, evolves; a detective story behind understanding complicated feelings. It's very human, very real but also, fundamentally, extremely fun to read.
Rebecca Watson, author of Little Scratch
Leo Robson's The Boys is written with such a brisk, charming sense of humour that you almost don't notice how touching it is. There's something delightful on every page.
Lauren Oyler, author of Fake Accounts
Tender and acerbic by turn, indisputably British, Leo Robson's The Boys yields its secrets as particular pleasures to be acquired one by one; as if the reader, like the novel's sharply observant narrator, were making their way through a labyrinth, entangled in familial wonders and revelations
Joyce Carol Oates
Full of joyously messy characters and acute observations, The Boys is a brilliant and witty portrait of a family fractured across generations and continents. In the days after finishing the book, I found myself passing off its insights as though they were my own.
Joe Dunthorne
The Boys is a London novel, site specific, exact in its textures. Its protagonist is a born noticer. He is both lonely and sociable, needy and self-contained. Summer days and new relationships are rendered with a grace that is lyrical at times but also ironic and comic, in a tone perfectly-pitched.
Colm Tóibín
This is a cracking debut from cultural journalist Robson, an exercise in sparkling repartee amid the North London summer doldrums.
SAGA Magazine
Robson describes millennial unease with wit and compassion. His unconventional household is memorable and he offers perceptive observations on generational difference, family ties, friendship, losing parents and becoming a parent
Observer
An emotionally intelligent deep dive into sibling relationships, where love, rivalry and connection are all examined. Funny and wise
Daily Mail
Enterprising and spritely comic novel . . . I enjoyed it immensely
New Statesman
Engaging and smartly ironic debut
Independent
Luminous, eccentric and memorable
Guardian
A nostalgic read, full of delicious individual snippets
Something Curated
The Boys luxuriates in a kind of North London nostalgia, decisively slotting into the traditions and tropes of a distinctly British literature . . . technical perfection
The Irish Times
I have read it before, and am returning to it for the velocity of the sentences and the comedy of the idioms
Frances Wilson (TLS Summer Reads 2025)
A subtle book . . . But there's a lot of pleasure in that subtlety: dryly witty sentences that dwell on the smallest details of social interaction; literature's best (and probably first) running gag about Alt-J. A great entry in the underappreciated canon of hanging-out novels
GQ

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