As promised, 14-year-old Daniel “Skippy” Juster dies in the opening scene of Paul Murray’s tragicomic masterwork. But much remains to be seen in the ensuing chapters. Who is responsible for his demise? And why does he die such a weird death, gasping for air on the floor of a doughnut shop without having eaten any doughnuts? And what are we to make of his final message, written on the floor in syrupy raspberry filling: “TELL LORI”?

Set in Dublin at the Seabrook College for boys, Skippy Dies combines the visceral power of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest with the raw anxieties of life in the 21st century. The result is a dazzling and uproarious novel in which nearly all the characters are at odds with one another (and with themselves) as they walk the line between fantasy and reality, spectacular deception and jaw-dropping revelation. While a ruthless Acting Principal (“the Automator”) tries to dissolve the school’s affiliation with the Holy Paraclete Fathers, faculty and students alike revel in unholy obsessions. For the teenage drug dealer Carl, it’s porn, laced with his borderline psychotic fantasies. For the pudgy young genius Ruprecht, it’s a quest to open a portal to a parallel universe. Unable to get his students to understand the magnitude of the Great War, the history teacher Howard Fallon spends equal time trying to get it on with his sexy colleague Aurelie. For Eoin “MC Sexecutioner” Flynn, life is an endless hip-hop soundtrack. As for Skippy, with a distracted father and a cancer-stricken mother, he simply dreams of a day when no one harasses him anymore. There’s not enough Ritalin in the world to bring normalcy to Seabrook, but then again, normalcy is all relative within those historic walls.

Hailed by The New Yorker as an author who “gets away with just about everything,” Paul Murray reinvents adolescence, adulthood, and storytelling itself in Skippy Dies. We hope the following questions will help your book club survive the exhilarating ride.