Tipperary writer’s first novel is a thriller set in a flooded Glen of Aherlow

Tipperary Town writer Paul Whyte’s first novel transports readers to a post-climate change flooded Glen of Aherlow where the main characters spend their days scavenging for scrap during which they discover a mysterious estate with a dark secret. 

This intriguing futuristic thriller called Harrow The Boys is now on sale online and will be in bookshops from September 2. 

The book was originally due to be physically published and launched by Maverick House  this month but the publication date was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic crisis. 

Paul, a native of Pearse Park in Tipperary, says the book's title is part of a lyric from the famous 1798 ballad Boolavogue, one of his dad's favourite songs. 

He chose it because of the harrowing situation the main characters in the book find themselves in and because he sees some parallels between the story Boolavogue tells and what happens in the book. 

Harrow The Boys centres on Ram and two friends who live in a dystopian Ireland of the future where much of the mid-west of the country has been flooded by rising ocean and river waters. 

They live in a small hillside town called Christ King and they spend their days scavenging and selling the scrap they find amongst the flood waters. During a wade through flooded farmland they uncover a hidden and relatively untouched estate and go to investigate. But the story takes a dark turn when a group of armed men close in on them and the estate's secrets are slowly revealed.

Readers will have to buy the novel to find out what happens next. Maverick House promises the thriller moves at a “heart pounding” pace. 

Paul, who lives in Ballinteer in Dublin with his wife and three children, grew up in Tipperary Town and was educated at the Abbey CBS. He is son of Timmy Whyte and Caroline Baccache, who along with his brother Danny and sister Myriam all live in Tipperary Town. He works for a telecommunications company in Dublin by day and writes in his spare time at night after his children go to bed and on his commute to and from work on the Luas.  

“I started writing about 2007. One of my friends was a really successful writer. We would have conversations and he would slip me books to read. I started reading literary books and it sucked me in. I got obsessed with it.” 

Paul says he had a lot of ideas for stories going around in his head and initially didn't think he was capable of putting them down on paper.  But when he started writing, he just couldn't stop. He began submitting short stories for publication in 2012 and over the past eight years his work has been published in literary magazines like The Moth. 

He began writing Harrow The Boys while doing a creative writing course in 2016. He initially intended it to be a collection of stories but it became long enough to be a book. 

Paul says he was inspired to set the book in the stunningly beautiful setting of the Glen of Aherlow from his frequent visits and adventures there during his childhood.  In a blog about Harrow the Boys, which he posted online, he says he is proud of setting the story in the Glen of Aherlow and describes it as a “place you could imagine being ripped straight from a C.S Lewis story; overrun with a huge depth of mythological and historical significance.”

 “My dad is from Aherlow and I spent lots of time there when I was young,” he told The Nationalist. “I could pick 10 moments out of my life where I can picture myself standing at the Christ The King statue.

“I worked in Aherlow House for years in my teens and remember collecting glasses from the bar at 6am and looking out at the unbelieveable view of the Glen.” 

The March4 Tipp movement, which has highlighted Tipperary Town's economic decline and campaigned for more government investment, also influenced him in writing the book. He recalls the  March4Tipp protests  were taking place while he was working on the book and their message of an area abandoned stuck in his mind.  

The book is also heavily  inspired by  disaster movies set in the US that Paul watched while growing up, and, of course, the growing fears globally about climate change. 

Global warming and its consequences are an issue that concerns him but he stresses climate change is more a backdrop to the story in Harrow The Boys rather than a main theme.

 “I am not trying to shove it down people's throats,” he explains. “I don't go into what causes (the flooding). I really like stories that don't tell you everything so I kind of leave it in the background giving hints of it here and there.” 

Paul didn't want to set his thriller in a dystopian future so far fetched that it would turn off readers who wouldn't be big fans of the sci-fi  fantasy genre. 

 He believes  a flooded Ireland of the future is not too big a leap to imagine. Indeed, he studied drone photographs of flooded swathes of the Irish countryside as part of his research for the novel. 

While Harrow The Boys is first and foremost a tense thriller, Paul points out there is a lot of humour throughout the story. Like during the Covid-19 crisis, he tries to show how Irish people  try to adapt and make the best of things and survive with the help of laughter. 

Like all up coming novelists, he braced himself to receive many rejections for his manuscript of Harrow The Boys. He was thrilled and shocked when Maverick House informed him it wished to publish the book.  The Irish publisher is behind the publication of the acclaimed non-fiction books Siege at Jadotville and Prayer Before Dawn, which have both been made into movies. 

Paul says he is delighted Harrow The Boys is now released to the world online but his dream is to see it physically on a  shelf in a book shop.  When this happens in September, he says he would love to have a launch night for the book in his hometown.  

He is currently working on a sequel to Harrow The Boys and another novel based in Tipperary Town in the 1970s. He is certainly putting his native area on the literary map. 

Harrow The Boys is available on Kindle, Google Books, Nook, Kobo and more online outlets.