Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #256500 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

The Guardian
'Griffiths is known for his uncompromising vision; this brief, bleakly discordant novel, with its lightening flashes of beauty and calm is no exception'

Big Issue Wales
`Griffith's novella expands his gritty and uncompromising style... Striking and harrowing'

Daily Telegraph
`the writing leaps off the page...original and striking'

Customer Reviews

Runt
Niall Griffiths is one of the best writers in the UK today. His novels are harsh, profane and yet stunning in their beauty. Griffiths' characters never lapse into sentimentality and he sustains their voices in a way that makes other writers seem cowardly by comparison.

His latest offering, Runt, is another gem. Written as a monologue, the story unfolds through the voice of a boy; part man, part child, part savant and visionary. As in Griffiths' other novels the landscape is the stage for a brutal drama that questions the human condition.
Comparisons might be made to Mark Haddon's 'The Curious Incident of the dog in the night time.' But in truth, there's no comaprison to make.

Wonderful stuff.

A brilliant read
Told from the perspective of a 16 year old boy with an extremely limited vocabulary (the author claims he had around 700 words in his lexicon), this wonderful book will have you in its thrall from the first pages to the last. At times brutal, but with a humanistic heart, experimental but accessible, complex yet beautifully simple, you'll soon find yourself pressing it into the hands of friends, relatives, passers by and strangers on the train. In a word: extraordinary.

Different
I genuinely liked the book. The story was endearing - a rather slow teenager leaves school and goes to stay with his uncle to avoid his violent stepfather. The uncle has lost his wife to suicide and he and the boy bond and form an unusual but strong friendship.

The boy is "gifted." He has epileptic seizures during which he sees fantastic visions and feels an affinity with animals and the world around him. However, despite this ancient knowledge, he cannot articulate it as his IQ is very low.

The things I didn't like were the fact that the boy sounds TOO stupid. If he was as slow as the vocabulary in the text made out, he would be unable to make the observations about life that he does. Fair enough he has a limited vocabulary, but some of his words just sounded forced to me. And for some reason, heaven knows why, but I imagined his voice to be a deep souther American drawl... not good seeing as the book was set in Wales! And no matter how hard I tried to imagine him speaking in a Welsh accent, I couldn't.

I did like the way he came across as innocent though. Unashamed of himself and his feelings.