John Boyne
John Boyne is an author.
One book has swallowed the rest of John Boyne's bibliography. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas appeared in 2006, reached the screen in 2008, and by 2022 had sold more than eleven million copies in over fifty-eight languages, figures that put it among the best-selling novels ever written. He returned to that material sixteen years later with a sequel, All the Broken Places.
The rest of the output is larger and quieter than the phenomenon suggests: sixteen novels for adults, six for younger readers, two novellas and a collection of short stories. Boyne is a historical novelist before he is anything else, and the adult books are where the writing turns difficult on purpose. The absolutist and A history of loneliness are the ones readers who arrived through the children's book tend to find harder and better. A ladder to the sky is the coldest thing on the shelf. This House is Haunted is the outlier and the most purely enjoyable, a ghost story played entirely straight.
Writing for two audiences at once is the defining fact of the career. He has never treated the younger-readers books as the lesser track, and the adult novels have never softened to match, which is why the two halves of his shelf read as though two different writers produced them.
Books (5)
Where to start with John Boyne
Most people arrive through The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, and if you have not read it, read it and then keep going, because it is the least characteristic book he has written: short, fable-shaped, aimed at children, and successful on a scale nothing else here approaches.
The adult novels are the real body of work. The absolutist is the one to start with if you want the historical novelist at full strength. A ladder to the sky is the sharpest and the least kind, and the best proof that he can write nastiness as well as sorrow. A history of loneliness is the most Irish book on the list and the most uncomfortable. This House is Haunted is the one to read for pleasure with nothing else going on. The 2022 sequel, All the Broken Places, is not among the credits listed here.