Boy Friends

Enchanting and astonishingly compelling . . . A friend is a masterpiece of nature, Emerson said — and this book is as perfect a portrait of that natural masterpiece as I have ever read.

The Scottish poet's memoir reflects touchingly on male friendship and masculinity . . . Pedersen pays tender tribute to his late pal.

Boy Friends is an inclusive, collective hug, sharing platter of a book that takes us along for the ride . . . The words take flight and come into land, often with a laugh, on every page, and while it’s undeniably about male friendships, it’s a journey you don’t have to be a ‘boy’ to enjoy . . . life-affirming.

Pedersen is an enthralling narrator and his prose is poetic, written with enough electricity that it seems to jolt off the page. It is riotously funny . . . it’s the closest we’ll get to standing next to Hutchison again . . . Boy Friends opens up conversations about vulnerable subjects: the brunt of suicide, the circumstances of certain types of Scottish masculinity and where friendships fit into that.

Boy Friends sees Pedersen illuminate these companions with a poet’s eye, a comedian’s timing – and a lover’s care . . . a celebration and a lament – for a friendship that looked set to last for ever and didn’t . . . Boy Friends is intimate and confessional. Grief, captured without cliche, leaps from the page. In a story that passes from the dead to the living, from art to life and back again, Pedersen and Hutchison’s connection endures.

Michael Pedersen is a Scottish poet and performer, perhaps the most extravagantly talented to emerge in Britain since John Cooper Clarke . . . . Pedersen’s language is a juicy fruit pudding studded with Lowlands vernacular . . . Boy Friends is an unapologetic paean to the sweetness of a relationship now brutally terminated . . . [and] an entirely endearing addition to the literature of grief and the ameliorating pleasures of memory and comradeship.