John Boyne Books in Order

On a long-haul flight, Aaron Umber travels with his fourteen-year-old son to meet a woman from his past. Haunted by the abuse he suffered as a boy and fearful of the online world his son inhabits, he searches for the courage to tell the truth and break the cycle.

Quiet, space-obsessed Jeremy Grace feels that no one believes in his dream of travelling beyond Earth—except his loyal dog Maxwell. When the pair blast off on an unexpected cosmic adventure and face a looming comet, their courage and a little dancing might save the day.

Freya Petrus is a brilliant burns surgeon with money, status and a carefully controlled life. Beneath the polish lies a childhood trauma and a chilling capacity for harm, raising uneasy questions about whether cruelty is born, made, or some disturbing mix of both.

Evan Keogh escaped his harsh island childhood to become a star footballer in England, hiding that he’s gay and longing to paint instead. As he stands trial over a drunken night that ended in alleged rape, he replays the choices and compromises that brought him there.

After her husband is jailed for horrific crimes, Vanessa Carvin flees to a windswept Irish island, renaming herself Willow Hale. In her lonely cottage she relives a ruined marriage, a dead child and an estranged daughter, asking how much she chose not to see.

Now in her nineties and living quietly in London, Gretel hides the truth that she was once the daughter of a concentration-camp commandant and Bruno’s sister. When she witnesses a neighbour abusing his family, she’s forced to confront her own long-buried complicity and choices.

The Cleverleys are a privileged, media-savvy family whose lives revolve around phones, followers and carefully managed images. When a careless tweet from talk-show host George sparks outrage, each family member’s vanity and lies spiral into a darkly comic lesson in cancel culture.

An unnamed narrator lives many lives across two millennia, reborn in different places and eras but always circling the same family, betrayals and acts of violence. As he pursues revenge and artistic purpose, the shifting settings explore how little human nature truly changes.

Twelve-year-old Sam idolizes his older brother Jason, a popular football star who seems to have everything. When Jason comes out as Jessica and asks to live as a girl, Sam watches his family implode and must decide what loyalty and love really look like.

Ambitious Maurice Swift wants literary fame more than anything, but lacks original stories of his own. Seducing and betraying writers, lovers and even his wife, he steals their secrets for his novels, only to discover that a life built on other people’s truths can’t hold.

Born to a shamed teenage mother and adopted by chilly Dublin intellectuals, Cyril Avery spends decades hiding his sexuality in a hostile Ireland. His winding journey—from secret crushes to exile and homecoming—charts a life shaped by shame, love, found family and a changing country.

Orphaned French boy Pierrot is sent to live with his aunt, a housekeeper at an isolated mountain estate called the Berghof. As he grows up under Adolf Hitler’s approving gaze, schoolboy innocence hardens into complicity, leaving him haunted by what he did and failed to stop.

Twelve unsettling stories follow farmers, priests, teenagers, couples and killers pushed to extremes. Secrets, shame and buried desires surface in unexpected ways, showing how far people will go to protect family, escape their pasts or cling to a fragile sense of themselves.

Odran Yates enters the seminary in 1970s Ireland convinced he’s answering a holy calling. Decades later, as abuse scandals engulf the church, his memories force him to examine what he chose not to see about friends, superiors and his own comfortable silence.

In 1867, schoolteacher Eliza Caine accepts a post as governess at remote Gaudlin Hall, only to find two unnervingly self-sufficient children and no visible adults. Beset by violent supernatural attacks, she digs into the house’s dark history to save her charges.

On Alfie Summerfield’s fifth birthday, war breaks out and his father soon breaks a promise not to enlist. Years later, Alfie shines shoes at King’s Cross and discovers his father’s name on hospital papers, leading him to a shell-shock ward and a desperate rescue plan.

Barnaby Brocket has floated ever since he was born, mortifying his rigidly “normal” parents. When they literally let him drift away, Barnaby begins a round-the-world journey, meeting other outcasts and slowly learning that being different may be the bravest way to live.

Years after the First World War, Tristan Sadler travels to Norwich to deliver letters to the sister of his fallen comrade Will Bancroft. As he remembers their intense bond in training and the trenches, he confronts Will’s refusal to fight—and his own lifelong guilt.

Eight-year-old Noah runs away from home and stumbles into a strange forest village and a magical toyshop where puppets whisper and doors talk. Guided by an old toymaker’s stories, he’s gently pushed to face the truth about his mother’s illness and his own fear.

In old age, Georgy Jachmenev looks back on his extraordinary youth as a peasant’s son brought to serve in the Tsar’s Winter Palace. His memories of protecting the sickly heir and loving Zoya unfold against revolution, exile and the long shadow of loss.

Danny Delaney’s summer shatters the day his mother hits a small boy with her car, leaving the child in a coma. As guilt silences her and tension fills their home, Danny struggles to keep his family together and understand what forgiveness might mean.

Alison Clark returns, pregnant and anxious, to her parents’ farm in Wexford with her movie-star boyfriend in tow. Old resentments flare as her disapproving father clashes with them, and a tense visit forces the family to confront disappointment, pride and the possibility of forgiveness.

Street thief John Jacob Turnstile dodges prison by becoming Captain Bligh’s valet aboard HMS Bounty. Thrust into a world of brutal discipline, lush Tahitian shores and gathering unrest, he must choose where his loyalties lie when mutiny erupts at sea.

Nine-year-old Bruno moves with his Nazi officer father to a mysterious house beside a fence. Lonely and bored, he befriends Shmuel, a Jewish boy on the other side, never understanding the camp’s horror until their secret meetings lead to tragedy.

London, 1936: as gossip swirls about the king and Mrs. Simpson, charming Owen Montignac waits for his uncle’s will to rescue him from crushing gambling debts. When he’s disinherited, he embarks on a ruthless scheme that threatens his family and himself.

In 1910 London, the dismembered remains of Cora Crippen are found beneath her cellar floor and her mild husband Hawley vanishes with his mistress. As an Atlantic liner steams toward Canada, fellow passengers slowly realize a hunted couple may be travelling among them.

Raised on his father’s romantic tales of Buffalo Bill, William Cody spends years trying to escape the weight of that legend. When tragedy pulls him back to England, he must finally face what family myth and inheritance have cost him.

Matthieu Zela flees 18th-century Paris after his mother’s murder and soon discovers he has stopped aging. Over the next two and a half centuries he reinvents himself again and again, watching generations rise and fall while carrying an ever-heavier burden of memory.