Childish Loves
From the 2025 Booker Prize shortlisted author of The Rest of Our Lives
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- £6.49
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- £6.49
Publisher Description
When his former colleague Peter Sullivan dies, the narrator of Childish Loves inherits his life's work - a number of fragmentary manuscripts about the life of Lord Byron. Fascinated by his prose - and intrigued by the rather sinister rumours surrounding Peter's life, including whispers of an inappropriate liaision with a young boy - he has the manuscripts published and then sets out to discover whether the reimagining of Byron's lost memoires can provide a key to Sullivan's own elusive life and tarnished reputation.
Acting as a literary sleuth, he sorts through boxes of Sullivan's writing; reads between the lines of his scandalous, Byron-inspired stories; meets with the Society for the Publication of the Dead; and tracks down people from Peter's past in an effort to untangle rumour from reality. In the process, he crafts a masterful story-within-a-story that turns on uncomfortable questions about childhood and sexual awakening, innocence and attraction, while exploring the lives of three very different writers and their brushes with success and failure in both literature and life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The conclusion of Markovits's Byron trilogy focuses on Lord Byron's youth and then finally his death. Markovits skillfully blends the stories of Byron's discovery of his own homosexuality with that of his lover and finally, with the story of Ben Markovits, the writer who is piecing together this novel from the manuscripts of a dead colleague, Peter Sullivan. The character of Markovits attempts to understand Sullivan's life through his work, tracing his family and past. This task proves difficult given that Sullivan had been accused of sexually harassing a former student and was teaching under an assumed identity. Markovits, himself facing difficulties in his marriage, explores his feelings about desire. Markovits, the author, demonstrates a facility with language and construction of narrative by building parallels between the three writers featured in the story . These parallels show the different fates that writers can meet immortality, modest commercial success, and utter obscurity while determining the importance of dedication to family, art, and sexual passion. While readers who are unfamiliar with the previous two books in the series may be a bit thrown by the story-in-story route (which does not occur in the other two), they will likely be inspired to pick up Markovits' past work.
