Cyril Avery is not a real Avery or at least that’s what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. But if he isn’t a real Avery, then who is he?

Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun, Cyril is adrift in the world, anchored only tenuously by his heartfelt friendship with the infinitely more glamourous and dangerous Julian Woodbead.

At the mercy of fortune and coincidence, he will spend a lifetime coming to know himself and where he came from – and over his three score years and ten, will struggle to discover an identity, a home, a country and much more.

In this, Boyne’s most transcendent work to date, we are shown the story of Ireland from the 1940s to today through the eyes of one ordinary man. The Heart’s Invisible Furies is a novel to make you laugh and cry while reminding us all of the redemptive power of the human spirit.

I slept on this book for way too long, and I’m a little mad at myself for it. I finally picked it up, and I absolutely loved it. It’s a rough read in places, but Boyne also threads in real moments of levity that kept me from drowning in the heavier material.

Cyril is born in 1940s Ireland to a teenage mother whose village has just kicked her out for getting pregnant before marriage. He’s adopted by a rich, albeit strange, Dublin couple who never quite let him forget he isn’t really one of them, and that he’s never going to be. From there the book follows Cyril through the next several decades of his life. Along the way he meets a boy named Julian who becomes his best friend and his secret first love. The book is the story of Cyril’s entire life, but it’s also a quiet, devastating portrait of Ireland and what it has been like to be a gay person in that country.

Cyril is one of those underdog characters you can’t help but root for. He’s an outcast from the day he’s born. His birth mother gives him up under brutal circumstances, then his adoptive parents take him in but never quite let him be one of them. And, perhaps the most tragic of all, the boy he loves more than anyone else in the world cannot love him back, at least not in the way Cyril wants. (What gay boy hasn’t been there at least once?) Watching this kid stumble through his life trying to figure out where he belongs broke my heart, but also, at times, made me smile because I recognized a lot of what he went through. He’s tender and funny and a little bit of a disaster, and I would have gladly followed him for another five hundred pages.

The book spans decades, and Boyne doesn’t pull punches about what gay history actually looked like across those years. The homophobia is everywhere, baked into the church, the law, and the language people use. The fear and oppression is real, and the lengths it drives men to go to hide their secret is heartbreaking. History has not been kind to gay men, and this book doesn’t pretend otherwise. It lays it all out without flinching, and that unflinching quality is part of what makes the book so powerful.

The 1980s chapters hit especially hard. When the AIDS crisis arrives, the book shifts into something starker, and Cyril’s life shifts with it. The whole tone gets more solemn. The grief is everywhere. The losses are stacked. I won’t spoil anything, but those chapters often knocked the wind out of me.

And yet. Cyril keeps going. He doesn’t get a clean, neat life. Instead he gets a real one that many gay men, especially those born before the late 1990s, will recognize. He goes through rejection and humiliation and love and heartbreak and loss and redemption and absurd moments that made me laugh out loud right in the middle of all that sorrow. He gets to figure himself out in pieces, the way most of us do, which made him feel all the more real.

I’ll be thinking about Cyril for a long time. If you’re up for a book that’s going to put you through it and reward you for sticking with it, this is the one. It’s heavy, but it’s also tender. It’s funny. It’s deeply human and I’m so glad I finally read it. I’m just sorry I waited so long, but also sorry that I can’t experience it again for the first time.

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