The Prince's Boy

Description

In May 1927, nineteen-year-old Dinu Grigorescu, a skinny boy with literary ambitions, is newly arrived in Paris. He has been sent from Bucharest, the city of his childhood, by his wealthy father to embark upon a bohemian adventure and relish the unique pleasures of Parisian life. An innocent in a new city, still grieving the sudden loss of his beloved mother Elena seven years earlier, Dinu is encouraged to enjoy la vie de Boheme by his distant cousin, Eduard. But tentatively, secretly, Dinu is drawn to the Bains du Ballon d'Alsace, a notorious establishment rumoured to offer the men of Paris, married or otherwise, who enjoy something different, everything they crave. It is here that he meets Razvan, a fellow Romanian, the adopted child of a man of refinement - a prince's boy - whose stories of Proust and other artists entrance Dinu, and who will become the young man's teacher in the ways of the world. At a distance of forty years, and written in London, his refuge from the horrors of Europe's early twentieth-century history, Dinu's memoir of his brief spell in Paris is one of exploration and rediscovery. The love that blossomed that sunlit day in such inauspicious and unromantic surroundings would transcend lust, separation, despair and even death to endure a lifetime. This is a work of extraordinary sensual delicacy, an exquisite novel from one of our most celebrated writers.

Paul Bailey is an award-winning writer whose novels include At The Jerusalem, which won a Somerset Maugham Award and an Arts Council Writers' Award; Peter Smart's Confessions and Gabriel's Lament, both shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction; Sugar Cane, a sequel to Gabriel's Lament, Kitty and Virgil, Uncle Rudolf and most recently Chapman's Odyssey. He is the recipient of the E. M. Forster Award and the George Orwell Memorial Award, and has also written and presented features for radio. Paul Bailey lives in London.

A writer whose tone is like a long, cool drink on a sweaty day ... Rich in character studies, yet so delicately written one barely registers at first its many layers and nuances, The Prince's Boy is a winterly evocation of a grief and love that will not wither ... Tender and profoundly touching, this is a novel whose almost dry manner could lure the reader into thinking the author has no designs on you. By its end, however, his fingers have squeezed your heart * Herald * If Fred Astaire had been a novelist he'd have been Paul Bailey. This beautiful, moving novel is a piece of dazzling footwork and reveals Bailey once more as one of the wittiest, most panacheful and most graceful writers we have. I love this beautiful book * Ali Smith on Chapman's Odyssey *