Children of the Sun - Softcover

Schaefer, Max

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847081150 ISBN 13: 9781847081155

Publisher: Granta Books, 2007

Synopsis

1970: Fourteen year old Tony becomes seduced by the skinhead movement, sucked into a world of brutal racist violence and bizarre ritual. It's a milieu in which he must hide his homosexuality, in which every encounter is potentially explosively risky. 2003: James is a young TV researcher, living with his boyfriend. At a loose end, he begins to research the far right in Britain, and its secret gay membership. He becomes particularly fascinated by Nicky Crane, the leader of the movement who came out as gay before dying of AIDs in 1993. The two narrative threads of this extraordinarily assured and ambitious first novel follow Tony through the seventies, eighties and nineties, as the skinhead movement splinters and weakens, and James through a year in which he becomes dangerously immersed in his research. James starts to make contact with individuals on far right websites. He starts receiving threatening phone calls. And then the lives of these two very different heroes unforgettably intersect. Children of the Sun is a work of great imaginative sympathy and range - a novel of unblinking honesty but also of deep feeling, which illuminates the surprisingly thin line that separates aggression from tenderness, and that gives us a picture of a Britain that is strange and yet utterly convincing.

About this title

About the Author

Max Schaefer was born in London in 1974 and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. Children of the Sun is his first novel.

From Publishers Weekly

Schaefer obsessively maps in his debut the overlapping disintegration of skinhead subculture and rise of gay subculture in London. Tony Crawford, a violent and secretly gay skinhead in the 1970s and '80s, appears in nonlinear fragments that intersect with those of the narrator, James, who, in 2003, is supported by his parents while he researches a screenplay about notorious homosexual skinhead Nicky Crane. By the time James begins a relationship with skinhead Adam, the skinhead style has been annexed from fascism in the name of fashion; indeed, Adam is distressed by James's excessive interest in neo-Nazis. Schaefer, meanwhile, charts Tony's odyssey through the collapse of neo-Nazi skinhead culture--his first boyfriend was a skinhead and he followed suit, starting down a path that led to prison and deterioration, surviving just long enough to become an impoverished cultural relic and an answer to the mystery James is chasing. Losing large chunks of regurgitated political history would have allowed Schaefer's complex parsing of turn of the century identity politics to shine. Schaefer is obviously a talented writer, but one who needs to be editorially reined in.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Granta Books
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1847081150
• ISBN 13: 9781847081155
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336