The Ballad of Ronan McCoy Author: Colin MorganISBN-13: 978-0-00-876508-8Publisher: HQGuideline Price: £16.99Colin Morgan’s debut novel is often preoccupied with what people cannot say to one another. Though known primarily for his work as an actor, Morgan brings to fiction an attentiveness to silence and emotional restraint, crafting a bildungsroman that explores friendship, loss and the ways grief can isolate or bind people together.Brendan, the novel’s teenage narrator, moves through life at a slight remove from the world around him. School corridors, classmates and even his part-time work at a funeral home feel distant, as though he is observing his own life from somewhere just outside it. At home, grief and exhaustion have settled into the everyday of the world around him. His mother, a carer at a nursing home, returns from long shifts only to retreat to bed, while his father belongs to a generation of men who struggle to articulate emotional truths aloud. Still reeling from the death of his grandmother, Brendan finds solace in the company of his best (and only) friend, Ronan McCoy.Morgan establishes the boys’ friendship with warmth and credibility. Ronan possesses an ease Brendan lacks and their relationship carries the fierce intimacy particular to adolescence, when friendship can become a shelter against the world. After an accident leaves Ronan wheelchair-bound and non-verbal, however, the novel enters more difficult emotional territory. Brendan must confront not only his friend’s altered condition, but his own uncertainty about how to remain close to someone who now seems unreachable.[ Experts in a Dying Field by Patrick Freyne: A debut novel of charm, melancholy and magicOpens in new window ]The novel’s later chapters, in which Ronan briefly improves, are among its most affecting. Morgan focuses on the smaller, quieter movements of grief: the awkwardness of visits, the complications of caregiving and the strange persistence of ordinary life around catastrophe. Brendan’s growing friendship with Jennifer introduces a gentle counterweight to the novel’s sorrow, while the growing friendship between the two families offers the novel a measure of warmth without ever undoing its sorrow.There are moments when Brendan’s narrative voice feels noticeably younger than his years, and this occasionally jars against the emotional complexity of the material. Yet even when the prose leans towards sentimentality, the novel remains grounded in genuine compassion for its characters. The Ballad of Ronan McCoy is an empathetic and thoughtful debut from a writer clearly invested in the emotional possibilities of storytelling, and in the belief that compassion itself can be a form of endurance.Patrick Holloway is the author of The Language of Remembering