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Book Reviewed by:A debut novel inspired by the true story of the author's grandparents, tracing the slow-burn love story between a Catholic priest and a progressive theology teacher across Rome and England during the twentieth century.
It's the 1960s, and David is handsome, charismatic, and sworn to celibacy. An exemplary Catholic priest, devotion to God is all he's ever known, and all he ever thinks he will. In London, Margaret is adrift, healing from the loss of her parents and the end of a recent love affair. Increasingly drawn to the church, she sets out to join the new revolutions of sex and faith, taking up a teaching position at an all-girls school in David's diocese.
Decades later, Margaret is being cared for by her grandson, who has just discovered the strange truth of his family history. So begins the story of forbidden love and ardent faith, devotion and sacrifice, as the consequences of David and Margaret's unlikely union play out across generations. A first novel from an award-winning poet, A Private Man traces the exquisite love of two brilliant characters caught between passion and piety as they seek to usher the church they cherish into a more progressive era.
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...
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (6/4/2026)
FINISHED: A Private Man by Stephanie Sy-Quia—a novel about a family history that a young man discovers while caring for his aging grandmother. His grandfather was a defrocked priest according to...
-Anne_Glasgow
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (5/28/2026)
...ializing in trees and she shares both her own memories of trees along with some of the racial history and significance that is associated with trees. A Private Man by Stephanie Sy-Quia—a novel about a family history that a young man discovers while caring for his aging grandmother.
-Anne_Glasgow
It is Margaret's amazing brain that quietly seduces David even as he argues that celibacy is the practical way for priests to practice sublimation (the transformation of desire). There is a difference between an easy read and a quick read. A Private Man is neither. As a novel, it asks for time. It asks its readers to live within its breathable boundaries of religion and absence. The writing is so beautiful the last thing you want to do is rush through it and yet you want to rush through it to see if David abandons the priesthood because he is in love with Margaret more than he is in love with the Church...continued
Full Review
(1274 words)
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(Reviewed by Valerie Morales).
Luke Kennard, author of The Answer to Everything
A luminous, deeply thoughtful and moving love story. Breathtakingly honest and true on sex, on art, on the analogy between religious and corporeal pleasure, A Private Man is also a meditation on care, faith, doubt and loss. A beautiful and wise novel. It's so rare to read something this deep that's also such a page-turner. Sarah Moss, author of Ripeness
I loved A Private Man. Sy-Quia writes beautifully and energetically about faith and food and clothes and sex. Her prose embraces beauty and her characters are complex and compelling. It's a rare pleasure to read this novel.The magnificent rose windows of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris are considered masterpieces of engineering for their artistic beauty, mathematical precision, and structural stability. Amazingly, the windows remained intact after the debilitating Paris fire of 2019.
The windows were created for medieval viewers, many of whom were illiterate. They were visual homilies that communicated faith, love, and salvation. They were glass books telling the story of Christ and his mother. The rose shape of the windows (a Gothic design for churches widespread in Europe) was circular to represent Christ as eternal. When the sun is at its highest point, the cathedral's interior is alight in colors with the message that God's radiance is the source ...
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