Böcker av Denton Welch

'Unlike any other person I had come across, Welch seemed to be speaking particularly to me' Alan Bennett'Vivid ... surprising ... an exquisite balance of pain and beauty' GuardianOrvil Pym does not fit in. A waifish, eccentric, sensitive fifteen-year-old, he hates school and longs to be alone. Spending his Summer holidays in a genteel Surrey hotel with his mysterious father and two brothers who don't understand him, he explores ancient churches, spies on a man rowing in the river and collects antiques, escaping into his own singular aesthetic world. First published in 1945, this is an unforgettable portrayal of a young man's sensuous coming-of-age.'A heightened, sensual journey ... it is Orvil's vibrant energy that allows this book to bubble ... beautifully odd ... spectacular' Independent

Introduced once as bright boy of British belles letters, there may be a dubious few to whom his emasculated exoticism, nasty naughtiness may appeal... Not us... This is a fictional sequel to his Maiden Voyage, with many of its elements in exaggerated form, as Denton Welch continues to cultivate the odd, the perverse, the physically distasteful, the emotionally insecure. Here is Orvil Pym, 15, anxious adolescent with a fastidious femininity, as he spends a summer with his father and virile elder brothers. His fetid fancies, fears, bad dreams, his pursuit of objects d'art, his explorations and awkwardnesses, - socially, sexually, and his impotence in a cruder world all combine to no story, but reveries expressed in unalluring metaphor... But no... (Kirkus Reviews)

'After I had run away from school, no one knew what to do with me...'Born in Shanghai in 1915, son of a wealthy rubber merchant, Denton Welch was dispatched to an English boarding school after his mother's death.

In the last eight years of his life - and he died when he was only thirty-three - Denton Welch wrote three novels, umpteen short stories, hundreds of poems, and - between 1942 and 1948, a profoundly personal and moving journal that recorded his swift maturity into a writer of genius. Therein he wrote of his battle with ill-health, his life lived in claustrophobic rooms, and (in frank, erotic terms) his frustrated pursuit of the 'ideal friend.' And yet he encountered some of the foremost writers of his time - Edith Sitwell, Herbert Read, Harold Nicolson, Vita Sackville West - and recorded every aspect of life with a fresh and arresting sensitivity.