Adams Breed

We rely on your support to help us keep producing beautiful, free, and unrestricted editions of literature for the digital age. Will you support our efforts with a donation ? Olga Boselli, a young Italian woman who immigrated to London with her parents at the turn of the century, dies during childbirth. Her son, Gian-Luca, is raised by his grandparents, but his grandmother, a hard woman with a nose for business, resents him—and God—for taking the life of her daughter. As Gian-Luca comes of age, he struggles to find an identity and meaning in his life. His grandmother, the mother figure in his life, is cold; he grows up in an Italian ghetto, and so feels simultaneously apart from his English peers, but neither entirely fitting in with the culture of the Italian immigrants around him. He turns to poetry to help fill that void, and then later, to work as a waiter at an elegant restaurant. But even after he marries a loving woman who treats him like a king, he still feels unmoored from the society around him—and then World War I begins, sending him spiraling into a repulsion for food and the life he's found himself in. Adam's Breed was a critically acclaimed bestseller in its day, earning both the James Tait Black Memorial Fiction Prize and the Prix Femina—Vie Heureuse . Its plot has been compared favorably to Siddhartha , another bildungsroman focusing on the search for religious meaning. Radclyffe Hall (died 1943) was an influential writer of the modernist period. Their work has endured across generations and continues to be read and studied worldwide. As a work of classic literary fiction, Adams Breed exemplifies the narrative craft and social insight that defined great storytelling of its era. Literary fiction of this period was characterized by careful attention to character psychology, social milieu, and the moral questions that animated public discourse.