Short History Of A Prince

Jane Hamilton

From Shelf: Women's Prize for Fiction shortlisted titles out of print

A young man looks back on his adolescence to when he was 15, a year in which he discovered a passion for another boy, and when his brother was dying of an insidious illness. This is a story of family relationships, the pain and insecurity of adolescence, friendship, love and fate.

Walter McCloud was constantly eclipsed by those around him - his beautiful, talented friends, his flamboyant relatives, his golden-boy brother, Daniel. He was always the outsider, never the star. But the summer of 1972 was a turning point in the life of fifteen-year-old Walter. It was the time when he realized that his great passion for dance would never be matched by his talent; the time when he discovered the funny agony of first love' and the time when he watched his brother declining into a cruel, untimely death. It is only when, twenty-four years later, Walter returns to fight for the survival of his childhood Eden, his family's lakeside summer home, that he finally discovers a way to reconcile himself to the past in a way that gives hope for the future.

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