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Horatio Stubbs #1
The Hand-Reared Boy
The groundbreaking novel about sex and growing up, available as an ebook for the first time. Longlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize, The Hand-Reared Boy was the first literary novel to honestly, and explicitly, explore the sexual awakening of a young man. Quite shocking when first published in 1970, it is now considered a classic. It is the first book in the Horatio Stubbs Trilogy. Brian says: “Young Horatio Stubbs suffers the pangs of adolescence, but is weaned from the pleasures of masturbation by the delights offered by his school’s nursing sister, who is not all she seems. The novel became a great scandal in England, where it was rejected by thirteen publishers, and caused a lawsuit – as a result of which it became a bestseller.”
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1970
7 people are currently reading
290 people want to read
About the author
Brian W. Aldiss
831 books669 followersPseudonyms: Jael Cracken, Peter Pica, John Runciman, C.C. Shackleton, Arch Mendicant, & "Doc" Peristyle.
Brian Wilson Aldiss was one of the most important voices in science fiction writing today. He wrote his first novel while working as a bookseller in Oxford. Shortly afterwards he wrote his first work of science fiction and soon gained international recognition. Adored for his innovative literary techniques, evocative plots and irresistible characters, he became a Grand Master of Science Fiction in 1999.
Brian Aldiss died on August 19, 2017, just after celebrating his 92nd birthday with his family and closest friends.
Brian W. Aldiss Group on Good Reads
Brian Wilson Aldiss was one of the most important voices in science fiction writing today. He wrote his first novel while working as a bookseller in Oxford. Shortly afterwards he wrote his first work of science fiction and soon gained international recognition. Adored for his innovative literary techniques, evocative plots and irresistible characters, he became a Grand Master of Science Fiction in 1999.
Brian Aldiss died on August 19, 2017, just after celebrating his 92nd birthday with his family and closest friends.
Brian W. Aldiss Group on Good Reads
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews
April 24, 2025
In the words of your favourite YouTube clickbaiter, I was NOT EXPECTING this when I picked up my first novel from celebrated SF titan Brian Aldiss. Exploring the fecund realm of pre- and post- pubescent masturbation with more lurid detail than Portnoy’s Complaint, the first in the Horatio Stubbs trilogy is a riotous and candid look at the squalid sexual things that unsupervised children participate in when the parents are off having their affairs. I can’t recall a novel that explores such an awkward topic in such a direct and frivolous way, or a novel that explores the topic at all, making Aldiss’s sick-minded little frolic a readerly first (and hopefully a readerly last). As the story moves into one of puppy love with an older woman, the novel collapses into one of unwarranted sentiment, when all we wanted was more unapologetic filth. The strange things you find at the largest bookshop in Scotland . . .
December 11, 2013
Read this when I was a 13 year old boy in 1976, as did all my dorm mates. Yes we were at a boarding school so the book seemed topical to us. Had it confiscated whilst reading it in an exam (after I'd finished the questions). It was many weeks later before it finally emerged from the teachers staff room to be handed back to me considerably more dog-eared than when it had gone in.
April 11, 2010
I think it might have been Martin Amis who said that the main difference between pornography and mainstream literature lies in the treatment of masturbation. In mainstream literature, the basic assumption is that people don't masturbate. In pornography, the assumption is that people do nothing but masturbate.
According to those criteria, The Hand-Reared Boy can only be pornography. I didn't really experience it that way, however. It just happens to be the case that younger teenage boys do, indeed, spend a great deal of time masturbating and thinking about masturbating. The reasons are simple. Their hormones are set up so that their libidos are extremely active. However, since most of them aren't able to find girls who are interested in having sex with them, masturbation (either on their own, or with other boys) is the only kind of sex they are likely to get. Brian Aldiss's novel acknowledges these facts.
Thankfully, I never went to an all-male boarding school, so I can't say whether his descriptions of what goes on there at night are accurate. I'm inclined to believe they are. The novel is quite well written - Aldiss was a fine craftsman - and certainly scores for sociological interest. I'm undecided as to whether it can be classed as erotica. I can't say it turned me on, but I'm sure it all depends on your tastes!
___________________________________________
When The Hand-Reared Boy came out in 1970, people were shocked - but, having just seen Kick-Ass, I can say with confidence that the idea has now gone mainstream. About five minutes in, we got to a hysterically funny and rather graphic scene where Aaron Johnson is sitting in his bedroom fantasising about his English teacher and her ample cleavage, as an impressive pile of used Kleenex accumulates in his waste-paper basket. There was no deathly silence, and no one walked out. Instead, a chorus of mildly scandalised giggles, mixed with calls of "Ewww!" and "Gross!"
Well, that's progress! I think.
According to those criteria, The Hand-Reared Boy can only be pornography. I didn't really experience it that way, however. It just happens to be the case that younger teenage boys do, indeed, spend a great deal of time masturbating and thinking about masturbating. The reasons are simple. Their hormones are set up so that their libidos are extremely active. However, since most of them aren't able to find girls who are interested in having sex with them, masturbation (either on their own, or with other boys) is the only kind of sex they are likely to get. Brian Aldiss's novel acknowledges these facts.
Thankfully, I never went to an all-male boarding school, so I can't say whether his descriptions of what goes on there at night are accurate. I'm inclined to believe they are. The novel is quite well written - Aldiss was a fine craftsman - and certainly scores for sociological interest. I'm undecided as to whether it can be classed as erotica. I can't say it turned me on, but I'm sure it all depends on your tastes!
___________________________________________
When The Hand-Reared Boy came out in 1970, people were shocked - but, having just seen Kick-Ass, I can say with confidence that the idea has now gone mainstream. About five minutes in, we got to a hysterically funny and rather graphic scene where Aaron Johnson is sitting in his bedroom fantasising about his English teacher and her ample cleavage, as an impressive pile of used Kleenex accumulates in his waste-paper basket. There was no deathly silence, and no one walked out. Instead, a chorus of mildly scandalised giggles, mixed with calls of "Ewww!" and "Gross!"
Well, that's progress! I think.
April 10, 2019
Wanking between the wars.
August 7, 2017
His most seminal work?:)
September 15, 2017
Cuando me recomendaron esta novela hace más de quince años me la vendieron como un chaval descubre su sexualidad a través de la masturbación en un internado británico. Mano Dura no es sólo eso... aunque durante muchas páginas lo parece. El narrador recuerda su infancia y cómo a través de su relación con sus hermanos, el servicio de su casa y sus compañeros de colegio fue introduciéndose en el sexo. Desde la ingenuidad y la ausencia de sentimientos cuando era un niño, una simple exploración para satisfacer una curiosidad, llenar el tiempo, encontrar un placer inexplicable, hasta entrar en la pubertad y darse de bruces con una dimensión nueva.
Aldiss no se recrea en los escarceos pero es brutalmente incisivo y certero en cada descripción, lo que puede hacer que alguno acabe un tanto saturado de las mútiples formas en las que Horatio, su protagonista, se inicia en sus misterios. Sin límites ni tabús. Mientras, va introduciendo una descripción de un entorno escolar y unas relaciones familiares distantes y frías donde la noción del sexo no existe y, cuando no se reprime, se explora cayendo en todo tipo de mitos y abusos.
Más allá de su procacidad, Mano dura no es demasiado relevante... hasta sus últimas 50 páginas. La verdadera iniciación emocional de Horatio, el relato de ese inevitable desengaño amoroso. El final es un tanto abrupto y las continuaciones no están traducidas, así que no soy mucho de recomendarlo aunque su lectura me ha merecido la pena. Habiendo leído tantas novelas de género de Aldiss, da una idea de lo que hizo más allá de las fronteras de la fantasía y la ciencia ficción.
Aldiss no se recrea en los escarceos pero es brutalmente incisivo y certero en cada descripción, lo que puede hacer que alguno acabe un tanto saturado de las mútiples formas en las que Horatio, su protagonista, se inicia en sus misterios. Sin límites ni tabús. Mientras, va introduciendo una descripción de un entorno escolar y unas relaciones familiares distantes y frías donde la noción del sexo no existe y, cuando no se reprime, se explora cayendo en todo tipo de mitos y abusos.
Más allá de su procacidad, Mano dura no es demasiado relevante... hasta sus últimas 50 páginas. La verdadera iniciación emocional de Horatio, el relato de ese inevitable desengaño amoroso. El final es un tanto abrupto y las continuaciones no están traducidas, así que no soy mucho de recomendarlo aunque su lectura me ha merecido la pena. Habiendo leído tantas novelas de género de Aldiss, da una idea de lo que hizo más allá de las fronteras de la fantasía y la ciencia ficción.
December 3, 2025
I found this in a second hand bookshop and was intrigued as I understood it to be a memoir of childhood by Brian Aldiss, who was born in a market town close to where I was born and grew up in Norfolk and who became one of the twentieth century’s greatest science fiction writers. What path took him from one to the other? The book wasn’t quite what I was expecting, being a fictional account of a young boy’s passage from childhood to young adulthood and quite a surprising one too. You could call it a bawdy Bildungsroman. Nevertheless, especially in the last third, it’s a moving and tender account of the transition from innocence to experience and the realisation as war breaks out in 1939 that adulthood is much more complex and uncertain than it appears from the perspective of childhood.
Having read the book, I’ve just looked up Aldiss’s life in the ODNB and A Hand-reared Boy is clearly based on his own family and school life.
Having read the book, I’ve just looked up Aldiss’s life in the ODNB and A Hand-reared Boy is clearly based on his own family and school life.
July 1, 2024
I purchased and read this wonderfully funny novel over twenty years ago and I am delighted to put into words how much pleasure this book has given me and so many others since its first publication in 1971. How often do you get a chance to wax lyrical, and without embarrassment, about a novel about masturbation? I think it is a great deal better than Roth's Portnoy's Complaint but I doubt Aldiss will ever supplant Roth in academia.
Do I need to remind everyone that while this is a novel about masturbation it is not a novel intended to inspire masturbation, though I suppose it could. Anything can and has inspired/caused/ led to masturbation but there is a difference between result and intent. I won't be the first reviewer of this book to mention the old saying that the difference between literature and pornography is that in literature no one wanks and in pornography no one does anything else; but I may be the first to point out that the saying is rubbish. There are a lot of things that until very recently weren't mentioned in literature but pornography has always dealt with more. Aldiss is probably the first writer of literature to deal so exuberantly with wanking and thank goodness. I don't want to read much about wanking but I don't want it to be taboo.
The richly comic and frankly scabrous telling of the onanistic adventures of Aldiss' younger self is so refreshing compared to anemic vapourings of writers like Simon Raven who made career in novel after novel of coyly hinting at the lubricious nastiness of schoolboys and others without ever mentioning so much as the unbuttoning of their trousers. Pre Aldiss is a world of 'Carry On' film 'suggestiveness' with the honesty of a government statement and about the same level of humour and literary style. Aldiss blows all that away - and has such fun doing it. And you will have such fun reading about it.
A really fun novel about growing up in England before, during and after WWII. Although Aldiss became a first rate writer of science fiction he shows in this and some of his other books that he had the talent and material to write anything he wanted. This is a novel that should be much better known.
Do I need to remind everyone that while this is a novel about masturbation it is not a novel intended to inspire masturbation, though I suppose it could. Anything can and has inspired/caused/ led to masturbation but there is a difference between result and intent. I won't be the first reviewer of this book to mention the old saying that the difference between literature and pornography is that in literature no one wanks and in pornography no one does anything else; but I may be the first to point out that the saying is rubbish. There are a lot of things that until very recently weren't mentioned in literature but pornography has always dealt with more. Aldiss is probably the first writer of literature to deal so exuberantly with wanking and thank goodness. I don't want to read much about wanking but I don't want it to be taboo.
The richly comic and frankly scabrous telling of the onanistic adventures of Aldiss' younger self is so refreshing compared to anemic vapourings of writers like Simon Raven who made career in novel after novel of coyly hinting at the lubricious nastiness of schoolboys and others without ever mentioning so much as the unbuttoning of their trousers. Pre Aldiss is a world of 'Carry On' film 'suggestiveness' with the honesty of a government statement and about the same level of humour and literary style. Aldiss blows all that away - and has such fun doing it. And you will have such fun reading about it.
A really fun novel about growing up in England before, during and after WWII. Although Aldiss became a first rate writer of science fiction he shows in this and some of his other books that he had the talent and material to write anything he wanted. This is a novel that should be much better known.
September 7, 2017
A semi-fictional autobiography by science fiction writer Brian Aldiss, The Hand-Reared Boy is the story of a pre-teen and teenage middle class boy, Horatio Stubbs, Aldiss' author avatar, growing up in country England in the lead up to World War II.
As implied by the title, this is a detailed account of masturbation, sometimes solitary but more often shared: with Horatio's older brother and younger sister, with other boys at school, with the family maid, with those rare girls of his own age he managed to get together with, and with the boys at Branwells Boarding School. Happily, there is no physical or sexual abuse in any of these pages; every participant, both the many boys and the occaisonal girls and women, are willing participants.
A second narrative of the book is Horatio's obsessive love for and pursuit of Virginia, an older yet still highly sexually desirable woman who is a matron at Branwells, and who marks the transition from his life of youthful innocence and fun to the tragic and depressing world of tainted adulthood.
While there are numberless other books on sexual and erotic escapades, these are almost always of sex with a partner. It's not clear why something as ubiquitous as masturbation should be such an unpopular topic for writers, but, apart from Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, I don't know of a single work of fiction that so fearlessly confronts this taboo. Indeed of these two authors and books, I far prefer Aldiss. His narrative is simply, lighter, less cluttered, easier to read, and undiluted by Roth's repetitive obsession with the neurotic nature of the Jewish psyche.
With an amazing feel for authenticity, whether from memory or journal or dairy notes, Aldiss describes the innocent naivety and experimentation accompanying awakening sexuality, and the way it gives way, at least in this case, to the bleaker and more disillusioned world of adult emotional and personal responsibilities.
As implied by the title, this is a detailed account of masturbation, sometimes solitary but more often shared: with Horatio's older brother and younger sister, with other boys at school, with the family maid, with those rare girls of his own age he managed to get together with, and with the boys at Branwells Boarding School. Happily, there is no physical or sexual abuse in any of these pages; every participant, both the many boys and the occaisonal girls and women, are willing participants.
A second narrative of the book is Horatio's obsessive love for and pursuit of Virginia, an older yet still highly sexually desirable woman who is a matron at Branwells, and who marks the transition from his life of youthful innocence and fun to the tragic and depressing world of tainted adulthood.
While there are numberless other books on sexual and erotic escapades, these are almost always of sex with a partner. It's not clear why something as ubiquitous as masturbation should be such an unpopular topic for writers, but, apart from Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, I don't know of a single work of fiction that so fearlessly confronts this taboo. Indeed of these two authors and books, I far prefer Aldiss. His narrative is simply, lighter, less cluttered, easier to read, and undiluted by Roth's repetitive obsession with the neurotic nature of the Jewish psyche.
With an amazing feel for authenticity, whether from memory or journal or dairy notes, Aldiss describes the innocent naivety and experimentation accompanying awakening sexuality, and the way it gives way, at least in this case, to the bleaker and more disillusioned world of adult emotional and personal responsibilities.
May 31, 2017
"The Hand-Reared Boy" is a book distinguished and ultimately undercut by its relentless sexual focus.
The narrative takes an episodic form detailing its hero's sexual escapades: homosexual, heterosexual, incestuous, and finally, loving.
It is the details of the last where the story starts to lose our interest. It leaves one cold to hear love described in the language of sex. We hear Horatio, the narrator, say he loves a woman, though only his sexual encounters with her are detailed with any passion. Since the book is almost nothing but other such encounters with many other individuals, we start to wonder why he is so enamoured of her.
The narrative takes an episodic form detailing its hero's sexual escapades: homosexual, heterosexual, incestuous, and finally, loving.
It is the details of the last where the story starts to lose our interest. It leaves one cold to hear love described in the language of sex. We hear Horatio, the narrator, say he loves a woman, though only his sexual encounters with her are detailed with any passion. Since the book is almost nothing but other such encounters with many other individuals, we start to wonder why he is so enamoured of her.
September 21, 2018
The lightheartedness in which the protagonist carried throughout the story is a breath of fresh air. The delivery is humorous, youthful and sensual. This was a light read; nevertheless, there was not a moment when I felt bored or disengaged from the plot.
May 18, 2017
I'm surprised I never came across this book when I was working my way through the mucky books section of my local library a few years ago (purely for the purpose of reviewing them on dooyoo you understand). This is a self-expressed taboo-busting cumming-of-age novel full-to-bursting with descriptions of teenage masturbation. A 'fictitious autoiography' in which Horatio Stubbs describes growing up (Growing? Up? Why has every word I write becum a double entendre?) in Leicestershire in the 1930's where he is tossed-off by almost everyone: his brother, his sister, the maid, and all the other boys in the dormitory of the Derbyshire public school he attends. Not his parents though, thankfully (although his father is a banker). Eventually he loses his virginity to the school matron - Sister Virginia - who, it transpires, is something of a Holly Golightly-like figure. That's the 1960's for you.
September 7, 2024
Vor dem 2. Weltkrieg. Das Buch erzählt die Kindheit eines Jungen aus dem oberen Mittelstand. Seine Mutter liebt ihn nicht wirklich, sein Vater kann es nicht zeigen.
Ungewohnte Kost von Brian Aldiss.
War das teilweise autobiografisch? Das viele Rumgewichse (wörtlich gemeint) nervt jedenfalls. Ich weiss nicht, ob das realisitsch war oder nicht. Die Beziehung zur viel älteren Krankenschwester wäre heutzutage klar ein Sittlichkeitsverbrechen.
Zuzusehen, wie ein verliebter Trottel sich zum Narren macht, ist auch nicht so angenehm.
Fazit: Naja, geht so.
Ungewohnte Kost von Brian Aldiss.
War das teilweise autobiografisch? Das viele Rumgewichse (wörtlich gemeint) nervt jedenfalls. Ich weiss nicht, ob das realisitsch war oder nicht. Die Beziehung zur viel älteren Krankenschwester wäre heutzutage klar ein Sittlichkeitsverbrechen.
Zuzusehen, wie ein verliebter Trottel sich zum Narren macht, ist auch nicht so angenehm.
Fazit: Naja, geht so.
February 20, 2019
Ah, the relentless masturbation of youth... Does it ever stop, I wonder?
This book was a revelation in my teenage years. Other boys ~gasp~ did it, something I was aware of when I wrote Queer Me!: Halfway Between Flying and Crying, but...
It's a romp, a riot, an absolute hoot, certainly when fifteen or so, and it has appeal for the adult still today.
This book was a revelation in my teenage years. Other boys ~gasp~ did it, something I was aware of when I wrote Queer Me!: Halfway Between Flying and Crying, but...
It's a romp, a riot, an absolute hoot, certainly when fifteen or so, and it has appeal for the adult still today.
August 17, 2025
Wildly smutty but sometimes sweet. The smarmy little Joffrey-type on the Corgi paperback sold it.
March 23, 2013
Hilarious!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 27, 2014
Frank enough to be page-turning, but I'm not sure I've ever met anyone whose sexuality is as straightforward and uninteresting as Aldiss's protagonist.
June 29, 2020
Smutty, funny and well written. The slightly incestuous elements of the journey of discovery are a bit discomforting...
October 12, 2023
Incest :-(
January 23, 2025
Laugh out loud and very witty novel that explores in a very explicit manner the sexual awakening of its main characters, Horatio Stubbs, this novel being the first one of a trilogy.
I read Aldiss Heliconia Trilogy, an epic work of science fiction, this was a pleasant surprise.
Highly recommend if you’re not a prude.
My Kindle version has “The Model” by Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827) as a cover, or got me censured on Facebook and Instagram. So if your e-reader updates your progress to either of those, be aware.
I read Aldiss Heliconia Trilogy, an epic work of science fiction, this was a pleasant surprise.
Highly recommend if you’re not a prude.
My Kindle version has “The Model” by Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827) as a cover, or got me censured on Facebook and Instagram. So if your e-reader updates your progress to either of those, be aware.
March 22, 2022
Even for today this is quite an explicit book. Not that this is bad in anyway. It's very frank, very fun and disturbing and very very well written. Both the childish aspects and the sexual ones ring true if very very differently from my own experiences.
Aldiss is a great writer, he captures the voice of the lead character so well that you feel that it must be mostly a memoir, but it's not. It's just great clear writing with a strong understanding of the age.
Aldiss is a great writer, he captures the voice of the lead character so well that you feel that it must be mostly a memoir, but it's not. It's just great clear writing with a strong understanding of the age.
July 20, 2022
A novel of two halves.
The first part deals with the sex life of a teenage boy, focusing on masturbation.
The second part changes gear as it deals with the boy's affair with a predatory older woman.
It's a familiar story, oft told, but emerges in Aldiss' telling as fresh and moving.
Although the novel is set in the 1930s, it had, to me, rather a feel of the late 1960s when the book was written.
The first part deals with the sex life of a teenage boy, focusing on masturbation.
The second part changes gear as it deals with the boy's affair with a predatory older woman.
It's a familiar story, oft told, but emerges in Aldiss' telling as fresh and moving.
Although the novel is set in the 1930s, it had, to me, rather a feel of the late 1960s when the book was written.
August 30, 2022
Whatever shock level it had in the '70s, little is left of that nowadays. Numbed by the ongoing search for the ultimate low in reality tv etc, it takes more than a book on wanking to offend.
Read it for what it is, a fun book about a kid who can't get enough.
And if you can look beyond the endless masturbation sessions, you might just realize that this is a well written book.
Read it for what it is, a fun book about a kid who can't get enough.
And if you can look beyond the endless masturbation sessions, you might just realize that this is a well written book.
February 11, 2018
Easily dismissed as titillation, but also rich in wisdom and observation.
December 5, 2021
I started reading this book because I respected and admired Brian Aldiss's other literary work, and wondered why had ventured to write concerning a topic that is usually placed in the category of smut or, nowadays, abuse. In fact, masturbation used to be called self-abuse.
What I found as I read on was a window into my own adolescence which miraculously relieved me of the last vestiges of guilt that I recognised had been buried deep in my mind. I realised that I shared a few of the story's protagonist's experiences, and the many that I did not share seemed to me quite possibly authentic.
This book I regard as a healthy antidote to a view nowadays that seems almost to amount to the belief that outside the bounds of marriage and consensual adult sexual relationships, all sexual activity is abusive. The view that Aldiss propounds is very different: that sexual activity is natural and bliss-conferring; that it is something to the nature of which one wakes gradually, and by means of which an intelligent person learns to respect the individuality and autonomy of their sexual partners.
What I found as I read on was a window into my own adolescence which miraculously relieved me of the last vestiges of guilt that I recognised had been buried deep in my mind. I realised that I shared a few of the story's protagonist's experiences, and the many that I did not share seemed to me quite possibly authentic.
This book I regard as a healthy antidote to a view nowadays that seems almost to amount to the belief that outside the bounds of marriage and consensual adult sexual relationships, all sexual activity is abusive. The view that Aldiss propounds is very different: that sexual activity is natural and bliss-conferring; that it is something to the nature of which one wakes gradually, and by means of which an intelligent person learns to respect the individuality and autonomy of their sexual partners.
April 11, 2012
Read in 1973 when I was 15 according to my old diary..
July 21, 2012
Ahem. Filthy stuff, but also very sweet and strangely innocent.
October 24, 2015
A novel of growing up. Sort of an English version of "Portnoy's Complaint." It was interesting.
April 8, 2018
Un livre qui m'a profondément ennuyé lorsque je l'ai lu. Dommage ...
April 5, 2017
A rather interesting peep into the developing sexuality of a young man and the sexual culture of the British boarding school. A lightly romantic storyline binds this together into something more than a titillation, but not quite the feel of a novel.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 30 reviews