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Stealing Happy

Brian Conaghan

Bloomsbury YA (12+) 9781526653987 (Paperback)

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Sonny’s family are struggling with financial hardship; his dad is unable to work due to long Covid and the family has borrowed money from a loan shark to try to remain solvent.  Despite the bleakness of their situation, there’s colour, warmth and humour as well as authentic depiction of Tourette’s syndrome which leads to Sonny making inopportune outbursts threatening his plans to carry out a Robin Hood style heist against the loan shark.

Themes:

  • Poverty 
  • Neurodiversity 
  • Social class 
  • Loan sharks 
  • Family pressure 
  • Humour 
  • Empathy 
  • Social inequality 
  • Tourette’s

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Brian Conaghan

Brian Conaghan lives and works in the Scottish town of Coatbridge. He has an MLitt in Creative Writing from the University of Glasgow and for many years worked as a teacher in Scotland, Italy and Ireland. His novel When Mr Dog Bites was shortlisted for the CILIP Carnegie Medal, The Bombs That Brought Us Together won the Costa Children’s Book Award, The Weight of a Thousand Feathers won the Irish Book Award for Teen/Young Adult Book of the Year and The M Word was shortlisted for the An Post Irish Book Awards. Cardboard Cowboys, Brian’s first middle-grade novel, was published in 2021 and Swimming on the Moon followed in 2023.

Shadowers' reviews and artwork