The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness

Passionate and courageous, insightful and humane, funny and moving, this is a wonderful book.David Nicholls, author of One Day

What Caveney achieves in this powerful, distinctive memoir is the positioning of his repeated sexual abuse into the landscape of an early Eighties adolescence . . . By turns honest, angry, funny, thoughtful, acerbic and desperately sad . . . Caveney impressively resists reaching easy conclusions . . . The book is percussive with black gags, as Caveney attacks the contradictions of his teenage years.Richard Beard, The Times

Caveney . . . writes with such robust, defiant attack that he never leaves the reader feeling like a prurient spy. His anger is blistering, any comedy not so much black as bile green . . . Caveney tells the story of his life brilliantly, but still you wish there was another one he could have written.Sunday Times

[The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness] is often bleakly funny and, alongside its troubling main theme, tells a more tender story of adolescent male friendship, unspoken parental love and music’s redemptive power . . . [Caveney’s] voice on the page is humane, big-hearted and without self-pity . . . it demands to be read.Guardian