Sandel

‘Here is a controlled and beautifully written love story . . . this is a superb stylistic feat.’ -- NEW STATESMAN  ‘The writing is always intelligent, its sensual quality surprisingly beautiful.’ --THE TIMES


Set in the 1960s in an Oxford college, when being gay was still an offence punishable by imprisonment, Sandel tells the story of a love affair between an undergraduate (David Rogers), and a cathedral choir boy (Antony Sandel). 


Beautiful, provocative, mischievous, sensitive and sometimes overwhelmed by the intensity of his own feelings, Tony Sandel bewitches Rogers. Both are talented musicians and Sandel’s astonishing voice, which Rogers explores as his accompanist at the transient moment of glory which precedes it breaking, is soon central to the relationship . . . 


Based on the author’s own experience, Sandel enjoys iconic status within the gay community.  The writer Stephen Fry lists Angus Stewart alongside Oscar Wilde, Gide, Genet, Auden, Baldwin, Orton, who opened his eyes to his homosexual identity as a boy. The setting of the novel places it in a tradition made famous by Evelyn Waugh (Decline and Fall, Brideshead Revisited).  But Sandel is also for readers of current writers Jasper Barry, James Wharton, River Jaynes, Mark Roeder, Sara York and Mark Zubro.