The Coward
Jarred McGinnis
Available as eBook, Downloadable audio
A startling and intimate debut novel which explores masculinity, family, disability and love as an estranged father and son struggle to reconcile
A BBC TWO BETWEEN THE COVERS BOOK CLUB PICK
After a car accident Jarred discovers he’ll never walk again. Confined to a ‘giant roller-skate’, he finds himself with neither money nor job, a shoplifting habit, an addiction to painkillers and strangers treating him like he’s an idiot. Worse still, he’s forced to live back home with his estranged father.
Trying to piece himself together, Jarred comes to realise that things don’t have to stay broken after all. The Coward is about hurt and forgiveness, how the world treats disabled people, and how we write and rewrite the stories we tell ourselves about our lives – and try to find a happy ending.
“Sings from its first lines … unbearably poignant … a truly uplifting emotional journey; a tender, wise, brutally funny novel”
guardian
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“Written with insight and savage wit … it is uplifting because McGinnis is a realist who never tries to sweeten the bitter experience of learning to navigate life in a wheelchair. His characters are vivid and impossible to forget, and he has an underlying optimism about the various ways in which muddled lives shake down and settle into something better”
the Times
“This beautiful book is a testament to the way people can, in spite of everything, reforge shattered emotional bonds and repair seemingly doomed relationships. You won’t find a more uplifting read in these dark times”
Irvine Welsh
“Black comedy alternates with fragile tenderness in this vivid and fiercely honest novel”
daily Mail
“Laceratingly funny, beautiful and true, true, true – right into its very human and very twisted heart. Read this book”
A.l. Kennedy
Jarred McGinnis
Jarred McGinnis is the co-founder of The Special Relationship, which was chosen for the British Council’s International Literature Showcase. His short fiction has been commissioned for BBC Radio 4 and appeared in literary journals in the UK, Canada, USA and Ireland. He is an Associate Writer for Spread the Word, a fellow of the London Library’s Emerging Writer Programme and a Writer-in-Residence for First Story. He also has a PhD in Artificial Intelligence, but mostly he inspires the able-bodied by using public transport and taking his daughters to the playground.
@JarredMcGinnis | jarredmcginnis.com
‘It is a novel, and I set that out very early… I new as someone in a wheelchair with a similar background to the main character I knew it’d always be conflated. So I call it kind of a land grab - I made the reader do the work, and kind of understand that to get to the book I wanted I had to y’know look at some very personal and intimite things in my life. And I couldn’t deny that the main character and I do share - he comes from me, and I didn’t want to have that degree of plausible denability that some other fiction writers utilise. I wanted to kind of admit that.’
Jarred McGinnis
Monocle Meet the Writers
Jarred McGinnis’s debut novel The Coward, reviewed in the Guardian:
“Jarred’s days of being wheeled to the doughnut shop by his father, or flirting in vain with a barista named Sarah, are juxtaposed with his wild past of hopping boxcars and getting into bar fights: the result is unbearably poignant. The only way Jarred can survive it is with a lacerating gallows humour. Gags and merciless asides abound, all laced with the bitter truth of experience: ‘Paraplegia isn’t just the golden ticket to great parking and people’s condescension,’ he quips early on… The Coward is a truly uplifting emotional journey; a tender, wise, brutally funny novel that assiduously avoids the saccharine.”
Guardian