Novel tackles Catholic sex-abuse scandal

In a telling anecdote that arrives in the first pages of A History of Loneliness, John Boyne's corrosive new novel about the sexual-abuse scandal in the Catholic Church in Ireland, Father Odran Yates recalls a startling change in his nephew, Aidan, in his teens.
Once cheerful and extroverted, Aidan inexplicably becomes distant and angry. Later, at a family gathering, a semi-drunk Aidan confronts his priestly uncle and demands, mysteriously, "Do you never wish you could go back and live it all over again? Do everything differently? Be a normal man instead of what you are?" Father Yates denies it, answering that at the center of his life in the church has been "a feeling of great contentment."

http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2015/02/27/a-history-of-loneliness-a-novel/23936837/