A poignant, coming of age novel about an Irish gypsy boy’s childhood in the 1950’s from the national bestselling author of A Rip in Heaven and American Dirt . Ireland, 1959 : Young Christopher Hurley is a tinker, a Pavee gypsy, who roams with his father and extended family from town to town, carrying all their worldly possessions in their wagons. Christy carries with him a burden of guilt as well, haunted by the story of his mother’s death in childbirth. The wandering life is the only one Christy has ever known, but when his grandfather dies, everything changes. His father decides to settle briefly, in a town, where Christy and his cousin can receive proper schooling and prepare for their first communions. But still, always, they are treated as outsiders. As Christy struggles to find his way amid the more conventional lives of his new classmates, he starts to question who he is and where he belongs. But then the discovery of an old newspaper photograph, and a long-buried secret from his mother’s mysterious past, changes his life forever.... *Starred Review* Christy, nearly 12, is an Irish Traveller, a Pavee, a child of motion who, with his family, journeys restlessly from town to town, never staying in any place long enough to call it home. But when his beloved Grandda dies, family secrets begin to spill out, and things begin to change, perhaps irrevocably. Set in Ireland in 1959, Cummins' first novel (she's also the author of the memoir A Rip in Heaven, 2004) is a deeply moving and elegiac look at a vanishing culture. Told in Christy's vernacular but often poetic first-person voice, The Outside Boy is gorgeously written and an implicit celebration of Irish storytelling. And it offers a convincing and evocative look at a way of life little known or understood by the many foreign to it. Though Cummins' treatment of the Pavee may sometimes seem idealized, she is quick to acknowledge their occasional petty thefts and tradition of mooching. Her overriding, beautifully realized theme is larger than that, however: it is the universal desire to find a place where one belongs and people—whether one's own family or as-yet-unknown others—whose presence provides essential comfort, contentment, and completion. --Michael Cart Praise for The Outside Boy “Some of the greatness of  Angela’s Ashes  dampens these pages, maybe as much as is possible for an author for whom this is fiction, not memoir. Beautifully crafted scenes and characters keep the pages turning.”—Historical Novel Society “A full-throated song of praise. I loved it.”— New York Times  bestselling author Sherman Alexie “A poignant and magical tale.”— New York Times  bestselling author Keith Donohue “[A] gloriously poetic novel...Read this lovely book.”— New York Times bestselling author Malachy McCourt “Truly charming at times, heartbreaking at others, but always captivating...it will stay with you long after you’ve finished the last page.”— New York Times  bestselling author Lesly Kagen “ The Outside Boy has found a permanent home in my head and heart and on the shelf with authors like J. M. Barrie, Roddy Doyle, and Sue Monk Kidd. A flawless coming-of-rage story overflowing with talent, heartbreak, and joy.”—National bestselling author Jennifer Belle “Her dynamic tale unfurls through the singular lens of the clever and charming Christopher Hurley, a wise-beyond-his-years boy coming of age in a tiny corner of history, but trying to answer the most universal of questions: Who am I and where did I come from?”—T Cooper Jeanine Cummins is the bestselling, award-winning author of the groundbreaking memoir A Rip in Heaven and the novels The Outside Boy , The Crooked Branch , American Dirt, and Speak to Me of Home . She lives in New York with her husband and two children. PROLOGUE IRELAND, 1959 I was dreaming of purple horses. Myself on one and Martin on the other, and we was bareback, and we was racing. These wasn't no strong, slow, piebald gypsy ponies like most of us travellers had in them days in Ireland, for pulling our wagon-homes behind us wherever we went. No, in this dream, me and Martin raced thundering thoroughbreds at a proper race meeting, like at Punchestown in Dublin. And the crowd waved their colors and they roared for us, never mind that we was travellers. They loved us anyway. Our purple stallions was sixteen hands high at least, and we was so swift on them we nearly took flight. I had the coarse thickness of my horse's mane wrapped full around my fist, and I squeezed his big, strong neck with my knees and kept my head down close beside his twitching ear. I whispered to him, "Go on, bucko," and he went and went, and we was leaving Martin and his horse in our dust. And then there was an almighty screeching howl that went up, and my purple horse vanished, and I was sitting up straight as a fencepost in the dark, my blanket wrapped 'round my fist and my heart hammering. Dad was sitting up beside me, too, and we blinked confu