How to build a boat by Elaine Fleeney

Longlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize • Shortlisted for the 2023 An Post Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year • One of the Globe and Mail's "Sixty-Two Books to Read This Fall" • One of the Globe 100's Best Books of 2023 • A New Yorker Best Book of 2023

Jamie O'Neill loves the colour red. He also loves tall trees, patterns, rain that comes with wind, the curvature of certain objects, books with dust jackets, rivers, cats, and Edgar Allan Poe. At age thirteen, there are two things he wants most in life: to build a Perpetual Motion Machine, and to connect with his mother, Noelle, who died when he was born. In his mind, these things are intimately linked, and at his new school, despite the daily barrage of bullies and cathedral bells, he meets two teachers who might be able to help him, though each struggles against inertias of their own.

How to Build a Boat is the story of how one boy’s irrepressible dream finds expression through a community propelled by love out of grief. Lyrical and compassionate, it's a novel about the courage of conviction and the power of the imagination to transform—and how sometimes the best way to break free of old walls is to build something beautiful within them.

Elaine Feeney is a writer from the west of Ireland. Her 2020 debut novel, As You Were, was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Irish Novel of the Year Award and won the Kate O’Brien Award, the McKitterick Prize, and the Dalkey Festival Emerging Writer Award. Feeney has published three collections of poetry including The Radio Was Gospel and Rise, and her short story “Sojourn” was included in The Art of The Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories, edited by Sinéad Gleeson. Her work appears widely in The Moth, The Paris Review, The Stinging Fly, Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Feeney lectures at the University of Galway.