Excerpt from A Private Man by Stephanie Sy-Quia, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Prologue

2018

They put the neat box into a crisp hole in the ground. Everyone filed past to look down on it and throw roses in. Adrian felt dizzy, standing there, at the cut edge of the earth.

There was a knotted old yew tree, just as he'd been told there would be in any English churchyard. The gravestones came out of the ground like fungal nails. The church was small and dark and damp, bevelled with mossy flint.

He stood awkwardly at the edge of the car park, trying to see who he could name from the last gathering of the clan – his grandmother's phrase – but nothing came. His mother's genes were patent, playing out in the planes of the women's faces. He recalled the family anecdote of his mother, aged sixteen, walking into the local pub, and being greeted by the person behind the bar: 'You're a Fletcher.' She was. And he, Adrian, was Hilary Fletcher's only son.

Adrian couldn't remember his grandfather; he'd died of cancer when Adrian was four. There were only images: a plate of grapefruit, strong black coffee, knocking at his grandfather's door with a tray, the giant pink pills in the packet that his mother waved in front of him saying never, ever take these, even if they look like sweets; the arrival of all these relatives he didn't know, whom he stood near to now, not quite among. David Fletcher had long gone to ash, and this was his brother Ralph's funeral. A wintertime bout of pneumonia. He'd been nearly ninety.

The coffin had come in on the shoulders of Ralph's sons and his sons-in-law.

When the priest began to speak, or when members of the family stood up to read from the Bible, Adrian found he could not listen. His mind relinquished the rhythms of it. He stood for the singing and hid his voice among the others.

At the wake, held at the local golf club, his mother's eldest cousin, Emma, pulled him aside. He made excuses for his mother not being able to make the trip from California but Emma batted them aside. She had been corresponding with his mother about a crucifix, she said; had Hilary told him? She had not. It had belonged to his grandfather, David, apparently, but when he had died, Hilary had given it to Ralph, and now Emma had asked if she wanted it back. She did. Emma brought Adrian into a side room. The crucifix was larger than he was expecting, about forty centimetres. Emma unwound it from its bubble wrap to show him. The cross was made of ebony and the statuette of ivory. The Jesus had an intricate curled beard, and the muscles of his abdo men glistened into the drape of the loincloth. The nails pressed into his palms like mattress buttons.

Emma showed him the note she'd typed up to show to Customs. For the ivory, she said. If they ask. The note stated that the crucifix had been won by Adrian's great- grandmother as a school prize in Douai, circa 1913.

– All right, thank you, Adrian said. But why didn't Mum want to keep it, when Gung died?

Gung had been a name of his own devising.

– Oh I don't know, said Emma. He could see her attention being drawn to the washing- up her sisters were already coor dinating in the kitchen. – I imagine that after ... everything that happened, your mother didn't want anything to do with all of that stuff.

– What do you mean? What stuff?

– Oh you know. She was matronly now, brisk. – The lai cization and all that.

– What's that?

The Fletcher sisters had formed an assembly line, and the brothers, all men in middle age, were queuing up to hand their dirty dishes over the counter.

Emma pivoted back to him.

– What's that word you just said? he asked again. What does it mean?

Emma looked him up and down, and then the plough line disappeared from between her eyes and her face flashed wide and open.

He googled it in the toilets.

Knowledge like a cord cutting.

Excerpted from A Private Man by Stephanie Sy-Quia. Copyright © 2026 by Stephanie Sy-Quia. Excerpted by permission of Grove Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.