The Boys

We were ‘the boys’. That was all they ever called us …

In the youth novel The Boys, we follow six friends from their first day at school until their final fatal school day. We are in the upper middleclass suburbs of Copenhagen. The boys have all they need. Everything is going just great and they are on the way to the top – that’s the way they see it. They play football, get into scrapes, listen to hip-hop, skate. They start drinking. They discover marijuana, get into fights, talk about girls and they have their first sexual experiences – and all the time we feel the catastrophe looming.

This book is about ‘The Boys’. Who are they? Why do they act like this when they are in a group? How much porn do they watch? How much do they pressure each other into being a certain way? How much do they drink? And when push comes to shove, are they really so bad?

The Boys is an intense, honest and ultra-modern novel about the life of boys and young men in today’s ‘affluent’ Denmark.

About the author 

Jonas Kleinschmidt (b. 1982) has a degree in Danish culture from Copenhagen University. Besides writing books, he also works as a journalist, writing about the zeitgeist and music. Kleinschmidt published his first novel in 2017, Dig og mig og Zlatan (You and me and Zlatan), a youth novel about loss and grief, friendship and football.

Text translated by Paul Larkin