Boyne’s insider take on love and longing in the literary world

John Boyne’s latest offering has a dramatic storyline with many melodramatic twists Pic: Getty

Fiction: A Ladder to the Sky, By John Boyne, Doubleday, €17.50

‘Everyone has secrets,” writer Erich Ackerman tells his protégé, Maurice Swift, in John Boyne’s gripping new novel, as the younger man struggles to put shape on his work. “There’s something in all our pasts that we wouldn’t want to reveal,” he advises, “and that’s where you will find your story.”

Ackerman meets the impossibly handsome young writer when he is travelling to ...