Garrett Carr’s first novel for adults is set in his hometown in County Donegal the Atlantic coast of Ireland. 

West Coast Ireland’s fishing community is the backdrop where a baby is found abandoned in a barrel found on the shore, as if it had come in with the tide, one day in 1973. Named Brendan by Ambrose Bonnar, the fisherman who adopts him, after convincing his wife Christine to adopt the infant and raise him alongside their son Declan, the boy will become a source of fascination and hope for a town caught in the storm of a rapidly changing world.

Ambrose,  a man more comfortable at sea than on land, brings Brendan into his home out of love. But it is a decision that will fracture his family and force this man – more comfortable at sea than on land – to try to understand himself and those he cares for. Brendan, invested with a spiritual quality  by the villagers in light of his origins, he roams about bestowing “blessings”. Declan resents the intrusion from the start, disowning Brendan as his brother. The tension mirrors that between Christine and her sister, who begrudgingly cares for their ageing father.

Ambrose’s difficulties reflect the ups and downs of the fishing industry after Ireland joined the European Economic Community in 1973, which brought in catch quotas and foreign competition. A period of relative prosperity when he pairs his small boat with his friend Tommy’s is followed by hardship, while Tommy’s business flourishes with the well-timed purchase of a trawler. Aware of Bonnar’s precarious position, saddled with a large mortgage amid merciless interest rates, the town pools together to make an anonymous cash donation in an envelope marked “from a friend”.

Ambrose grapples with his role as a father in a culture that prizes strong, silent types, Declan tries to connect with his father by taking up his trade despite his true passion for cooking. His attempts to impress his crewmates and family with his culinary skills go unappreciated.  Declan is surprised to discover pictures of “new men” who “might talk about their feelings, cry and the like”.

“We hadn’t seen a new man in reality, they must’ve had them in England and certain parts of Dublin may be,” the narrator notes, “They weren’t our sort of thing, but you may be assured if a new man had accidentally strayed into our town he wouldn’t have been treated with respect.” 

“Fishing communities haven’t really featured in Irish writing according to Carr.

The Boy from the Sea articulates the experience of men “contained to the point of self-repression, preferring to look out at a wordless immensity than have even a second of introspection”.

The Boy from the Sea by Garrett Carr, Picador £16.99, 336 pages.