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H. S. Cross returns to "a school as nuanced and secretive as J. K. Rowling's Hogwarts" (The Rumpus) in Grievous, the sequel to her coming-of-age novel Wilberforce.
St. Stephen's Academy, Yorkshire, 1931. A world unto itself, populated by boys reveling in life's first big mistakes and men still learning how to live with the consequences of their own. They live a cloistered life, exotic to modern eyes, founded upon privilege, ruled by byzantine and often unspoken laws, haunted by injuries both casual and calculated. Yet within those austere corridors can be found windows of enchantment, unruly love, and a wild sort of freedom, all vanished, it seems, from our world.
Told from a variety of viewpoints - including that of unhappy Housemaster John Grieves - Grievous takes us deep inside the crucible of St. Stephen's while retaining a clear-eyed, contemporary sensibility, drawing out the urges and even mercies hidden beneath the school's strict, unsparing surface. The Academy may live by its own codes, but as with the world around it - a world the characters must ultimately face - it already contains everything necessary to shape its people or tear them apart.
"Starred Review. Cross is a good writer who draws on a Kipling-esque nostalgia in her entertainingly peculiar picture of the public school as crucible for young male Brits." - Kirkus
"Although elements of the writing style (disjointed dialogue and slang) may require some patience from the reader, the complex characters lend an intriguing poignancy to this tale." - Publishers Weekly
"Perceptively and richly written, this novel tells of a lost monastic world where the need to be loved may never be spoken and yet is in every heartbeat." - Stephanie Cowell, author of Claude and Camille and The Physician of London
This information about Grievous was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
H. S. Cross was born in Grosse Point, Michigan. She was educated at Harvard and has taught at Friends Seminary, among other schools.
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