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| “A very original debut and a very compulsive read, Children of the Sun had me hooked from the first page to the last.” ——David Peace, author of the Red Riding Quartet |
| “Children of the Sun is set among thugs in a mean, arid London landscape, yet thematically it occupies ground worthy of Mishima or Visconti . . . This is a very intriguing, involving and provocative novel, structurally smart, sociologically fascinating, and written in confident, sinuous prose.” ——Richard Kelly, author of Crusaders
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| "Brilliant . . . Schaefer's themes are serious and complex, and force you to ponder them long after you've put the book down . . . The only question after such a striking first novel is, what will he do next?" ——Alan Kenny, Socialist Review
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| A fascinating novel of contradictions . . . the delirious melding of reality and invention is striking. —Siobhan Murphy, Metro (UK) |
| A very original debut and a very compulsive read, Children of the Sun had me hooked from the first page to the last. —David Peace, author of Red Riding Quartet | |
Children of the Sun
Max Schaefer
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| Paper | 5 1/2 x 8 1/4 | 400 pgs. | ISBN: 1-59376-297-6 | List: $15.95 |
Coming August 2010 |
About the book: 1970: Fourteen-year-old Tony becomes seduced by Britain’s neo-Nazi movement, sucked into a world of brutal racist violence and bizarre ritual. It’s an environment in which he must hide his sexuality, in which every encounter is potentially deadly.
2003: James is a young writer, living with his boyfriend. In search of a subject, he begins looking into the Far Right in Britain and its secret gay membership. He becomes particularly fascinated by Nicky Crane, one of the leaders of the neo-Nazi movement who came out in 1992 before dying a year later of AIDS.
The two narrative threads of this extraordinarily assured and ambitious first novel follow Tony through the seventies, eighties, and nineties, as the nationalist movement splinters and weakens; and James through a year in which he becomes dangerously immersed in his research. After risky flirtations with individuals on far right websites, he starts receiving threatening phone calls—the first in a series of unexpected events that ultimately cause the lives of these two very different men to 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.
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 the book:
Inside it is all skins. There must be more than 200 of them . . . everybody is dancing, facing the front, in strict lines. And they’re all white, or nearly so . . . And then Dennis does an astonishing thing. He takes Tony’s hand in his and pulls him on to the dance floor. He does it with such ease that it’s not until he’s dragged him all the way into the line that Tony even notices what happened. It’s his body that responds first, the whole thing suddenly bracing itself of its own accord for whatever disaster will ensue, a big panicky swill of nausea splashing up from his stomach, sudden heat on the surface of his skin . . . Tony feels his blood throb in the tight grip. He looks round anxiously but finds no reaction. People haven’t seen—or rather they haven’t cared. Seen, but not noticed.
The record has ended, and the rows of men are fallen nearly still, waiting for the next track . . . Buoyed on his ebbing flood of panic, Tony readies himself . . . looking around him . . . he suddenly spots Ryan, the lad from Nigel’s car, who catches his eye and nods with a little nervous smile. Along the line in front, among endless slight variations in the pattern of braces meeting the waists of jeans, he sees in one gap two hands touching, and elsewhere fingers against the small of a back, and he feels Dennis, who has never let go of his hand, give it a squeeze, and the beat begins.
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