SIGNED David Keenan - Boyhood + ART PRINT

White Rabbit will publish Boyhood, cult author David Keenan’s most mature, magical and profoundly realised novel yet, in April 2026. Publisher Lee Brackstone acquired World English rights from Clare Conville at C&W.

Boyhood opens in 1979 with the abduction of a young boy outside a Glasgow football ground. Nine years later, the boy's brother, Aaron Murray, is on the cusp of that moment when adolescence becomes adulthood. His own journey of grief and recovery has been guided by an angel, ‘The Precious Gift’ – perhaps imagined, perhaps real – who has blessed Aaron with redemptive, messianic powers. These have enabled him to see through the past and present, joining the dots between a vast array of characters; ballerinas, soldiers, poets, burlesque dancers, East End gangsters and the Vampire of Derry over five decades, all tied up in each other's fate. As Aaron's visions span cities and decades, from wartime Paris to the Troubles in the 1970s, Mexico City in the 1980s to – of course - Glasgow, Boyhood builds to an extraordinary, intense, climactic moment of redemption.

A book of great joy, of laughter in the face of horror and delight in storytelling by the beloved and critically acclaimed author of This Is Memorial Device, Boyhood is a hymn to the resilience of youth, to the brave dreams of artists and lovers and a love letter to Glasgow – a city where magic happens.

David Keenan explained: ‘Boyhood is my favourite word and this is the book I have dreamt of writing since I was a boy myself. It is a love letter to Glasgow, my hometown, to the redemptive power of storytelling, and to the intercession of angels. I regard it as a precious gift, just as I do my own boyhood.’

Publisher Lee Brackstone said: ‘After a decade of conjuring with the form, David Keenan has now written the novel that will see this defiantly underground novelist break through to a more mainstream readership. Get ready for the great Glasgow novel, set in the 1980s, written in the twenty-first century...’

David Keenan is the author of multiple critically-acclaimed novels, including the cult classic This Is Memorial Device, which won the London Magazine Prize; For the Good Times, which won the Gordon Burn Prize and was shortlisted for the Encore Award; Xstabeth, which was shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and Monument Maker, which was a Rough Trade Book of the Year. He is also the author of England's Hidden Reverse, an acclaimed history of the UK's post-punk and Industrial music scenes. He has been writing about music since he was seventeen years old, most consistently for The Wire, and between the years 2004-2014 he co-ran the cult Glasgow record shop Volcanic Tongue. His selected music writing was published in 2025 as the collection Volcanic Tongue, which will be published in March 2026.

Boyhood will be published by White Rabbit on 9 April 2026 in hardback, trade paperback, ebook and audio digital download formats.