Unnatural Relations
Page 30
An American photography scholar working in Holland has befriended the ten-year-old son of colleagues there. Over the next two years, Will is increasingly caught up in tensions between Sander’s mother Marijke and her estranged husband Niek over his growing intimacy with Sander. And the boy himself — lovable but difficult — is increasingly demanding. As Sander’s twelfth birthday draws near, Will has to decide whether to return to San Francisco and the security of an academic life, or remain in Amsterdam, where he must face the risks of his friendship and Sander’s expressed need for him. In this delicately traced story, Joseph Geraci, a former editor of the Catholic Worker and co-founder of the journal Paidika, depicts the dilemmas that confront a lover of boys in a turbulent and unsympathetic world.
ISBN 0 854492313
UK £8.95 US$12.95 A US $16.95
Noel Currer-Briggs
YOUNG MEN AT WAR
Anthony Arthur Kildwick, born in 1919 to a well-to-do Yorkshire family, finds the love of his life in a German exchange student at his boarding school. Both boys are passionate to avoid another war between their countries, but when Manfred returns home he is seduced by Hitler’s nationalist rhetoric, while Tony meets the outbreak of war as a conscientious objector. As the Nazi regime shows itself ever more demonic, Tony reluctantly decides he must fight, is recruited into the Intelligence Corps and eventually parachuted into southern France, to work with the Resistance. There he discovers Manfred is now an officer with the occupying forces, and their paths cross again in dramatic circumstances.
Noel Currer-Briggs, well known as a writer on history and genealogy, has based this novel in part on his own experience. As well as a fascinating story, it conveys a vivid sense of the conflicts of the 1930s, and the interplay between friendship and internationalism, homosexuality and pacifism, patriotism and democracy, that was characteristic of those years.
ISBN 085449 236 4
UK£9.95 US$14.95 AUSS19.95