Over the years that process has become a little easier for the author. The week also brings the anxieties of good reviews, bad reviews, and out-there takes. He has just led a live performance of the book at the Southbank Centre with a cast including Ruth Wilson and Toby Jones, an event that sounds enlivening but also a little exhausting. When we speak, Porter is in the middle of publication week. As Porter summarises, “What do you with a problem like Shy? That’s the point of this book.” Though some reactions can be perplexing – Porter has learned he has “no right of reply”, even for the most eccentric takes – he’s excited to see what questions arise, from teachers, teenagers, society at large. “It’s one person on a stage being bombarded by the context in which he exists, and by the voices in his head and around him.” He hopes, on release, that “the reader becomes one of those voices”. “It’s a monologue really,” Porter, who lives near Bath, says.

Throughout his early morning journey, we learn of Shy’s past: bloody fights with his peers, an unsettled family life, increasingly concerned teachers. When we join Shy, he’s sneaking out of school and headed to the school’s pond, carrying a rucksack full of rocks. The book centres on a troubled teenager named Shy, who lives at a rural boarding school, named Last Chance, for similarly wayward boys.

“There’s something going on in these woods – a palpably strange sense of other people being there.” This is not the story we are here to discuss, but that feeling, of uncanny happenings and haunting echoes, is relevant to the one we are going to talk about: his latest novel, Shy, which is out now. But these woods, according to a Google search, are the eighth most haunted in Britain. This seems, as it likely did to Porter at the time, unbelievable. On the side of the tree, freshly carved into the still-oozing bark, was the word “Max”. “There’s an amazing beech tree, like astonishingly, almost inexplicably huge in the middle of these woods,” he tells me, over Zoom from a London hotel. Last autumn, after finishing his latest book, Max Porter returned to the woods he had visited just before starting that project.

2015 novel by max porter