A 1960s London Family try to ensure that a teenager avoids tragedy simply because of sexual orientation. This story, full of both humour and sadness, records the courage of the family members who take the law into their own hands by ignoring the rules. This follows a tragic loss in the family and the rape by a gang of youths of one of the young members of the family. The book also has much of the 'coming of age' about it. The atmosphere is beautifully lifted from the 60s when, even then, there was an echo of the Second World War in many places, and scars both mental and physical carried by the bulk of the population.
Peter Cameron (b. 1959) is an award-winning novelist and short story writer. Born in Pompton Plains, New Jersey, he moved to New York City after graduating college in 1982. Cameron began publishing stories in the New Yorker one year later. His numerous award-winning stories for that magazine led to the publication of his first book, One Way or Another (1986), which received a special citation for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for a First Book of Fiction. He has since focused on writing novels, including Leap Year (1990) and The City of Your Final Destination (2002), which was a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist. Cameron lives in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
On a point of information I thought it worth letting potential readers know that this is not a novel by the American writer Peter Cameron author of many novels like 'The Weekend', 'Final Destination' and 'Andorra' but a novel by an Englsih author of the same name and it is a first novel which, I am thinking of buying and reading.
My intention is not to disparage or discourage anyone from reading the Englsih Peter Cameron only to help those seeking out tonly he works of the American Peter Cameron.
Although the fact that the main character bears the same name as the author, which could lead the reader to believe this is autobiographical, the plot also has a dreamlike quality that takes the book away from reality and into the realm of fantasy.
Despite not being a great piece of writing (structure, style, etc), the book has a naive charm that keeps the reader engaged.