Borstal Boy

Borstal Boy (1958)
By Brendan Behan | Hutchinson
ISBN: none (long before anyone tried to barcode Irish mischief)
Condition: Good as sold by Crappy Old Books

This is Brendan Behan’s famous not-quite-a-novel, not-quite-a-memoir, fully-unmistakable account of his teenage years as an IRA boyo who ends up in an English borstal and discovers that life is more complicated than slogans and explosives.

If you like your coming-of-age stories with:

• prison walls,

• political awkwardness,

• sharp comedy,

• and absolutely no interest in making the narrator look heroic,

then you’ve found your book.

What actually happens (without spoiling all the scrapes)

Young Brendan, full of nationalist fervour and very little good judgment, travels from Dublin to Liverpool on a mission that… does not go as planned.

He is:

• arrested,

• tried,

• and packed off to borstal (youth detention) for his troubles.

Once inside, the book becomes:

• Part prison memoir – daily routines, guards, petty rules, dodges, fights, boredom.

• Part political comedy – an Irish republican discovering that the English working-class lads around him have their own problems and are not, in fact, cartoon villains.

• Part human education – about friendship, class, hypocrisy, cruelty and kindness in confined spaces.

By the end, you’ve watched Brendan:

• keep his sense of humour,

• sharpen his tongue,

• and acquire a more three-dimensional view of the world than the one he walked in with.

The tone: loud, funny, and dangerously honest

Behan writes like:

• a man who can’t help talking

• in a pub

• at 1 a.m.

• with everyone listening, whether they intended to or not.

Expect:

• Dublin wit, English slang, and a glorious mess of voices.

• Brutal moments side by side with laugh-out-loud ones.

• No sugar-coating of the system, but also no neat halo around his younger self.

He is entirely capable of mocking:

• himself,

• the authorities,

• the IRA,

• and anyone else who crosses the page.

Which is why the book still feels weirdly modern: it’s allergic to propaganda and sentimental self-pity.

This particular copy

From the photo and listing:

• Condition: Good – nicely solid and ready to be read rather than curated:

  • Plain cloth boards (no dust jacket), radiating that “serious 1950s hardback” energy.

  • Spine gently rubbed and just soft enough to show it’s been opened, but very much in one piece.

  • Corners with the usual bumps of a book that has actually lived a life.

Inside:

• Pages intact and legible, likely offering that warm 1950s paper tone.

• No alarming damage, no missing chunks – just a clean, working copy of a classic that’s survived better than most of its characters.

It’s the sort of copy that looks exactly right on a shelf between other slightly disreputable mid-century memoirs.

Why you might actually want this

• You’re into Irish literature, especially the not-very-well-behaved branch.

• You like memoirs of prison and institutions that focus on the people, not just the walls.

• You’re interested in the politics of the era but don’t want a history lecture; you want to hear it from inside someone’s skull.

• You have a soft spot for books where the humour is dark, the language alive, and nobody gets to be a simple hero.

It’s also one of those titles that gives your shelves instant credibility:

“Oh, you’ve got Borstal Boy.”
“Yes,” you say casually, as if this isn’t a very big deal.

Condition vs. Attitude

• Physically: Good – a tough little hardback with plenty of reading left in it.

• Spiritually: still raw, loud, funny, angry and unexpectedly humane.

No tidy moral, no neat arc of redemption – just a young man thrown into a system, watching and reporting with a memory like flypaper and a mouth that never quite stays shut.

Offered by Crappy Old Books, where the covers are plain, the binding is Good, and the borstal is safely confined to the pages—though the voice of Brendan Behan might still rattle a few bars in your head afterwards.

Keep browsing: See more Crime books Other books by Brendan Behan