A Boy's Own Story

Books

'Edmund White has crossed The Catcher in the Rye with De Profundis, J. D. Salinger with Oscar Wilde, to create an extraordinary novel. It is a clear and sinister pool in which goldfish and piranhas both swim. The subject of A Boy's Own Story is less a particular boy than the bodies and souls of American men; the teachers and masters; the lovers, brothers, hustlers and friends; the flawed fathers who would be kings to their own sons who should be princes' New York Times Review 'A breathtaking evocation of a young boy growing up in the fifties in an American town . . . The book's extraordinary power lies in the tension between the obsessive longing and then moments of denial, the attempts to transcend or avoid the inescapable fact of the boy's sexuality . . . There have been many good novels of adolescence; this one surpasses them all' Jeremy Seabrook, New Society 'The boy's self-portrait shines with authenticity, he is an extraordinary but plausible mixture of sweetness and deviousness . . . Add to this ...