The Prince's Boy - Hardcover

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 * What sets it apart is Bailey's elegant, elegiac prose and his moving, thought-provoking reflections on art and mortality * Mail on Sunday * A thoroughly satisfying book ... Paul Bailey, twice shortlisted for the Booker prize, has the same ability as Graham Greene to craft remarkable emotion and beauty from words than on the face of it are prosaic. There is no over-writing here, just superb, utterly readable prose * Independent on Sunday * An elegant meditation on love, sex and Marcel Proust ... Moving seamlessly between memoirs and dreams, The Prince's Boy sparkles with witty references to A la recherche du temps perdu * Sunday Telegraph * Bailey writes exquisitely about everything he touches upon, from falling in love to fascism ... the elegant narrative holds an intensity that crackles to the very end * Sunday Times * Bailey writes with lyrical beauty; this novel is charming and poignant * The Times * Bailey's precise, polished and often exquisite writing eloquently gestures towards the love between Dinu and Razvan * Times Literary Supplement * Bailey has mastered the craft of telling a large story through small but piquant details and knowing where the reader can be left to fill in the spaces. His nimble-footed storytelling moves lightly over great distances of time and space to produce something like a Victorian novel in miniature * Guardian * Bailey writes with lyrical beauty ... This novel is a charming, poignant little wisp of a thing * The Times * Spare and taut * Daily Telegraph * He has the same ability as Graham Greene to craft remarkable emotion and beauty from words that on the face of it are prosaic * Independent on Sunday * I'm home for my summer holidays this year with the pile of new books that I've been waiting to read for months, including Paul Bailey's The Prince's Boy ... Four writers I love, four brand new works, a surfeit of elegance and intelligence. Could summer get any better? * Ali Smith, Observer Summer Reading * It's difficult to sum up what a beautiful thing, what a strong, gentle and discerning book, what a lit firework, what a piece of elegance and understanding and what a good story Paul Bailey's The Prince's Boy is ... I'll be telling people to read it for the rest of my life * Ali Smith, New Statesman Books of the Year *