First Love and Loss Leave an Irish Mark
Friendship and first love give this Irish coming-of-age story its tenderness, but loss gives it weight. The emotional pull sits in ordinary youth, memory and belonging gathering significance before the characters fully understand what they are losing, or how deeply it will remain.
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The Ballad Of Ronan McCoy
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First Love and Loss Leave an Irish Mark
Friendship and first love give this Irish coming-of-age story its tenderness, but loss gives it weight. The emotional pull sits in ordinary youth, memory and belonging gathering significance before the characters fully understand what they are losing, or how deeply it will remain.
- Book Synopsis
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A tender coming-of-age story about friendship, first love, loss, and facing the ultimate question: who am I going to be? For fans of Douglas Stuart, Michael Magee, David Nicholls and Andrew O'Hagan
Brendan's best friend, his only friend, is Ronan McCoy. He knows things about Brendan that no one else does: about his job washing the cars at Feeney’s Funeral Home, about the loneliness he sometimes feels even when surrounded by hundreds of others at school. But Brendan never told Ronan about the dark feeling that sits at the bottom of his stomach, the feeling that tells him something bad is coming. It never comes when Ronan's around.
Ronan is smart and sporty and popular, totally comfortable in his own skin: all the things that Brendan himself isn't. But Ronan always makes him feel like a good friend, a good person, a better Brendan. Standing at the school gates on the first day of term, the dark feeling begins to form in Brendan's stomach. And when Ronan doesn’t turn up, Brendan learns that something terrible happened to his best friend over the summer and he'll never be the same again. Over the course of the final year of school, Brendan will have to learn to navigate the new shape of their friendship and find a place for himself in the world without Ronan to protect him.
The Ballad of Ronan McCoy is a beautifully written, tender coming-of-age story about friendship and first love, loss and letting go, and the hopes and fears of a young man standing on the cusp of the rest of his life.
Ideal for readers who:
- Have a soft spot for tender Irish coming-of-age stories about friendship, first love and grief.
- Follow Brendan and Ronan's bond as it carries both humour and heartbreak.
- Reach for novels about loneliness, identity and the question of who to become.
- Are moved by emotionally precise fiction shaped by memory, place and loss.
- About The Author
- Colin Morgan grew up in Northern Ireland, a boy with an instinctive love for stories: hearing them, telling them, writing them, performing them. As an adult he counts himself very lucky that not much has changed, finding himself on stage, in front of a camera, before a microphone or with pen in hand, storytelling. The Ballad Of Ronan McCoy is his debut novel.
- Product Details
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- ISBN
- 9780008765088
- Format
- Paperback
- Publisher
- HQ, (18 June 2026)
- Number of Pages
- 384
- Weight
- 480 grams
- Language
- English
- Dimensions
- 234 x 153 x 32 mm
- Categories: