Why am I passionate about this?
Stephanie Cowell has been an opera singer, balladeer, founder of Strawberry Opera and other arts venues including a Renaissance festival in NYC. She is the author of Nicholas Cooke, The Physician of London, The Players: a novel of the young Shakespeare, Marrying Mozart, Claude & Camille: a novel of Monet, and The Boy in the Rain. Her work has been translated into nine languages and made into an opera. Stephanie is the recipient of an American Book Award. She has lived in NYC all her life.
Stephanie's book list on cherished historical LGBTQ love stories on my shelf
Why did Stephanie love this book?
Boyne is a master storyteller, enormously gifted in doling out a story so that it unfolds bit by bit before us. I am in awe of his skill.
After WWI, a young soldier called Tristan is compelled to visit the sister of a fallen comrade to deliver the sister’s saved letters to her brother. All we know of Tristan is that he has endured something so terrible he at times would prefer not to live.
What he does not tell is that he was intimately involved with her brother Will a few times, and loves him, but though the intimacy to which Tristan gave his heart was dismissed as nothing by Will. To give everything to another, and then to have the loved one dismiss and deny it cruelly can wear the lover to past endurance.
Which young man was responsible in the end for the conclusion? Unbelievable writing.
1 author picked The Absolutist as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
It's September 1919: twenty-one-year-old Tristan Sadler takes a train from London to Norwich to deliver some letters to Marian Bancroft. Tristan fought alongside Marian's brother Will during the Great War, but in 1917 Will laid down his guns on the battlefield, declared himself a conscientious objector and was shot as a traitor, an act which has brought shame and dishonour on the Bancroft family. But the letters are not the real reason for Tristan's visit. He holds a secret deep in his soul. One that he is desperate to unburden himself of to Marian, if he can only find the…