Everyone is a Champion

Eleven thousand certificates. Four hundred and twelve children. One woman who still believes in the difference.

Dr. Madeleine Mulqueen runs a fee-paying Catholic school in County Meath that no longer uses the word Catholic in its brochures. Enrolment is down. The roof is going. And the education trust that owns the building has just issued a forty-one page framework explaining which honest sentences are no longer to be written about children.

Then Colm Twomey - thirty-four years in the same room, a widower who corrects in his dead wife's kitchen chair - types eleven true words into a school report.

A solicitor's letter arrives at nine forty the following morning. What follows is not a scandal. Nobody in the entire apparatus does a single wrong thing. A frightened mother makes a phone call. A careful brother sends a letter. A software company in Dublin removes the leading source of complaints. A board chairman looks at a spreadsheet and says the school will not grow by being right. Every step is reasonable, and nobody stops.

Everyone Is a Champion is a comedy about the machinery of modern kindness and what it costs the children it was built to protect - the boy who has been told he is exceptional two hundred and six times and knows it was never true, the eleven-year-old who wins by nine metres and is handed a medal that says I Took Part, the best singing voice in the building buried third from the left in a medley.

It is also a novel about faith. One system tells every child they are a champion and then makes it impossible to be told otherwise. The other tells you at the door that you are wanting, and then lets you sit down.

Deadpan, merciless with institutions and tender with the people trapped inside them, this is a book for anyone who has ever sat in a meeting where every single person was doing their best and the outcome was still absurd.

For readers of Jonathan Coe, Elizabeth Strout, Nina Stibbe and Kevin Barry.