In the heart of working-class Dublin, a selectively mute teenager’s desperate act becomes the catalyst for a fractured family to finally confront their neglect and rebuild their shattered lives.



Philly Mackey is almost fifteen and hasn’t spoken a word aloud in years. But inside his head, he never stops talking.

In a working-class corner of Dublin, the Mackey family is coming apart in ways none of them quite knows how to say. Philly’s mother, Alice, works three cleaning jobs and drinks to forget the life she imagined for herself. His older sister, Ursula, has earned a place at Trinity College but feels caught between the world she came from and the one she’s trying to enter. His thirteen-year-old brother, Jason, is drifting toward older boys and dangerous men. And Philly—out of school, overlooked, and more perceptive than anyone knows—finds an unlikely friend in Harry, a solitary older man with a gentle dog, a house full of books, and a past nobody seems to know.

Then a rumor begins to spread through the neighborhood.

Someone dangerous is living among them.

Nobody knows who.

Everybody thinks they do.

As Halloween approaches, suspicion hardens into certainty, and a family already struggling to hear one another is pulled into a community searching for someone to blame. Tender, darkly funny, and quietly devastating, Riverrun is a novel about family, class, silence, and the terrible consequences of believing we know the truth about other people.