The Young Accomplice

Product Information

You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here.

Indeed, Wright’s words provide the preface: “To see a failure changed to a success – there is what I call Education.” As a portrait of youthful mistakes and adult blindness, The Young Accomplice is both tender and cutting; it is often subtle and occasionally thrilling. If, at times, the mechanics of plot carry us away from the more grounded human emotions Wood has cultivated, it is no great matter. Some lessons are just worth hearing. Benjamin Wood's The Young Accompliceis a treat for those who have followed his career ... Its greatest quality is its understanding of how characters exist only in relation to one another. Each pairing gives us a new angle, and added depth, with the clarity of a diamond. Wood's daring narrative decisions show he hasn't lost the old spark, but has just added to it with his new repertoire. What, it asks, are the opportunities available to someone who wants to leap clear of their wrong beginnings? John Self, The Critic Best Books of the Year 2022But, two years later, she is waiting on a railway station in the tranquil English countryside. It's the summer of 1952 and she and her younger brother Charlie have just been released from borstal. Another fresh start awaits - but can Joyce ever outrun the darkness of her past? Wood’s natural observational style (Arthur’s realisation, as he looks at a man in the pub, that “every filling in that mouth — and likely everybody else’s in the building — had a faint connection to his wife”, whose father was a dentist, is one example), combined with his sensibility for the vocabulary and syntax of the time (the prose never feels stilted) make The Young Accomplice a well-wrought novel whose pleasure is in each careful scene, moment and sentence. Niamh Donnelly

MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window) Benjamin Wood is building a sublime body of work. This masterful, suspenseful novel is his best yet. It swallows you up. I love it. ​ David Whitehouse, author of About A Son Set mainly over the second half of 1952, but with brief forays into the years before and after, the narrative follows the siblings after they are released from borstal and taken on as architectural apprentices by Florence and Arthur Mayhood. They live and work together on the Surrey farm where the Mayhoods’ idealistic practice is based: tilling lessons in the morning; draughting classes in the afternoon. A happy time is had for a while, until Mal Duggan reappears. His latest work The Young Accomplice was published by Penguin Viking in June 2022. It was selected as one of the books of the year by The Times ​& Sunday Times, New Statesman, The Spectator, The Irish Times, and others. A serialised version of the novel was broadcast as a BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime in April 2023.thriller, romance and coming-of-age to gripping, memorable effect Sunday Times, Best Books for the Year This satisfyingly old-fashioned-feeling novel from a youngish author strikingly, sure-footedly conveys its 1950s rural setting, and has a grim pull of foreboding ... Benjamin Wood's perspective-shifting novel weaves elements of thriller, romance and coming-of-age to gripping, memorable effect. Patricia Nicol, Sunday TimesBest Books of 2022 Wood's] best novel yet . . . [he] deserves to be far better known John Self, Irish Times, 2022 Books of the Year Wood’s unnerving fourth novel follows young siblings from borstal to living on a farm in 50s England. As a portrait of youthful mistakes and adult blindness, The Young Accomplice is both tender and cutting; it is often subtle and occasionally thrilling. Christopher Shrimpton, Guardian Benjamin Wood is building a sublime body of work. This masterful, suspenseful novel is his best yet. It swallows you up. I love it David Whitehouse, author of About A Son