Gurriers

GURRIERS is a vivid, funny, and deeply moving portrait of working-class boyhood in Limerick.

Set among schoolyards, lanes, cinemas, confession boxes, riversides, docks, churches, and cramped family rooms, the book follows a generation of boys growing up with little money, sharp tongues, fierce loyalty, and more mischief than sense. They are beaten by teachers, shaped by hunger, lifted by friendship, tempted by escape, wounded by love, and carried forward by the stubborn humour of a city that refuses to be pitied.

At the heart of the story are boys trying to become men in a world that often misunderstands them. Larry runs toward danger, exile, and lost love. Andrew turns inward, finding meaning in books, work, memory, and the lives others overlook. Around them are fathers, priests, teachers, mothers, sweet-shop dreams, rebel songs, dock work, heartbreak, and the hard wit of Limerick itself.

Blending humour, sorrow, history, and tenderness, GURRIERS gives voice to the forgotten boys of the lanes - the ones dismissed as trouble, but remembered here as loyal, wounded, hilarious, brave, foolish, and fully human.