The Lantern Bearers - Softcover

Ronald Frame

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0715631330 ISBN 13: 9780715631331

Publisher: Duckworth & Co, 2001

Synopsis

Sent away from home for the first time, Neil Pritchard spends the long summer of 1962 with his Aunt Nessie in claustrophobic Auchendrennan on the Solway Firth. Eager for a pastime, Neil sings for Euan Bone, a young Scottish composer whose star is rising fast. Becoming Bone's muse, the afternoons spent at the composer's home turn into the blissful focus of his adolescent dreams. Suddenly, however, Neil is expelled from his Eden - with devastating consequences for all...

About this title

About the Author

The Lantern Bearers is Ronald Frame's twelfth book of fiction. He is a distinguished novelist and playwright and his television work has, amongst other awards, won the Samuel Beckett Prize. He has recently been working on a number of film screenplays and radio plays and writing for his long-running BBC Radio 4 serial, The Hydro. He was born in Glasgow.

From Booklist

Neil Pritchard, told that he will die of cancer within two years, presses forward with his book on the Scottish composer Euan Bone. He also tells in this book the story of his encounter with Bone shortly before the composer's death. Neil, 14 then and a superb boy soprano, was summering with his aunt in a southern Scottish coastal town when Bone enlisted him to help prepare a vocal score based on a Robert Louis Stevenson essay. All went beautifully, and Neil was falling in love with Bone; then his voice changed, ending the collaboration. Neil felt exiled from paradise, and when he returned to Glasgow for school, his parents' separation exacerbated his misery. In a resentful funk, he told the lie that Bone had molested him, which led, Neil came to think, to Bone's demise. Decades later, Neil learned that his deception may have precipitated the tragedy but wasn't why it happened. Frame's richly atmospheric gay coming-of-age novel, a prizewinner in Scotland, is reminiscent of Daphne du Maurier's most intriguing work. Ray Olson
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Edition details

• Publisher: Duckworth & Co
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0715631330
• ISBN 13: 9780715631331
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256