Alec

This novel "reimagining and extension of Forster's [Maurice] is a work of bountiful imagination" (New York Journal of Books).

William di Canzio's Alec, inspired by Maurice, E. M. Forster's secret novel of a happy same-sex love affair, tells the story of Alec Scudder, the gamekeeper Maurice Hall falls in love with in Forster's classic, published only after the author's death.

Di Canzio follows their story past the end of Maurice to the front lines of battle in World War I and beyond. Forster, who tried to write an epilogue about the future of his characters, was stymied by the radical change that the Great War brought to their world. With the hindsight of a century, di Canzio imagines a future for them and a past for Alec—a young villager possessed of remarkable passion and self-knowledge.

Alec continues Forster's project of telling stories that are part of "a great unrecorded history." Di Canzio's debut novel is a love story of epic proportions, at once classic and boldly new.

"Di Canzio's descriptions of [Alec and Maurice's] experiences are harrowing, tender, brutal, and comic. . . . The question Maurice raised—is there anywhere these men can truly be together?—is made the more real, not the less, by the war and this novel." —The New Republic