Alexander's Choice - Softcover

Marlowe, Edmund

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1481222112 ISBN 13: 9781481222112

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012

Synopsis

Sweet-natured, intelligent and good-looking, thirteen-year-old aristocrat Alexander Aylmer seems to have everything going for him when he goes to Eton, the prestigious English public school. Within months, however, tragedy strikes, leaving him vulnerable, heartbroken and increasingly alone, forced to find his own emotional salvation in a world that is effectively uncaring despite its good intentions. The longings recently come with puberty aggravate his turmoil until he sees the solution to them is the key to everything. Two very different people seem to promise help. Timid Julian Smith, three years older, nurses two secrets he is terrified the other boys might discover: his humble background as the son of a removals man who had saved all his life to send a son to Eton, and his being hopelessly in love with Alexander. Damian Cavendish, a charming, young English master, is romantically only interested in women. He is conscious though of a special affinity with boys that has brought him to Eton determined to teach and befriend them. He burns too with a longing to find himself badly needed. By luck and pluck, Alexander finds his way to unsurpassed happiness. But can he really get away with making his own choices as to how, without regard to what society has decided in advance is good for him? Alternately uplifting and heart-wrenching, and at times erotic, Alexander’s Choice candidly depicts a kind of passionate love the world is averse to recognising. It also reveals unflinchingly the brutal reality that can face a boy trying to have his emotional needs met in a society fallen into frightened confusion about the sexuality of early teens. Edmund Marlowe, himself an old boy of the school, has in this, his first novel, accurately evoked the idiosyncratic but appealing world of Eton, which carried on in many of its centuries-old ways, but could not protect its own against the new spirit of the 1980s.

About this title

Review

Alexander's Choice is an entertaining, engagingly written novel which
confronts serious and controversial issues with an unprejudiced, fresh
perspective, daring to question the rigid constructs of contemporary
society." - S. P. Somtow, multiple-award-winning author of 57 books

Review
"The sex scenes are thrillingly frank.  And there's fun to be had ... in
"trying to identify who the people in the book might be in real life." Eton had a bumper crop of future statesman and celebs in 1983 - David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Earl Spencer and Dominic West among them. Is Alexander's Choice a roman à clef? Is Julian, with his "wavy dark brown hair and thick spectacles" a fantasy portrait of the future Detectice McNulty? Alexander has "dazzling white teeth" and "golden-blond hair": is he based on Bojo? Earl Spencer? -- The London Review of Books

About the Author

After leaving Eton, Edmund Marlowe travelled widely for several years and pursued his passion for ancient and mediaeval history, finally settling down to write in rural France.

Edition details

• Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1481222112
• ISBN 13: 9781481222112
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 422