Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Prince's Boy
    Unavailable
    The Prince's Boy
    Unavailable
    The Prince's Boy
    Ebook169 pages2 hours

    The Prince's Boy

    By Paul Bailey

    4/5

    ()

    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this ebook

    In May 1927, nineteen-year-old Dinu Grigorescu, a skinny boy with literary ambitions, is newly arrived in Paris. He has been sent from Bucharest, the city of his childhood, by his wealthy father to embark upon a bohemian adventure and relish the unique pleasures of Parisian life.

    An innocent in a new city, still grieving the sudden loss of his beloved mother Elena seven years earlier, Dinu is encouraged to enjoy la vie de Bohème by his distant cousin, Eduard. But tentatively, secretly, Dinu is drawn to the Bains du Ballon d'Alsace, a notorious establishment rumoured to offer the men of Paris, married or otherwise, who enjoy something different, everything they crave. It is here that he meets Razvan, a fellow Romanian, the adopted child of a man of refinement – a prince's boy – whose stories of Proust and other artists entrance Dinu, and who will become the young man's teacher in the ways of the world.

    At a distance of forty years, and written in London, his refuge from the horrors of Europe's early twentieth-century history, Dinu's memoir of his brief spell in Paris is one of exploration and rediscovery. The love that blossomed that sunlit day in such inauspicious and unromantic surroundings would transcend lust, separation, despair and even death to endure a lifetime. This is a work of extraordinary sensual delicacy, an exquisite novel from one of our most celebrated writers.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateMar 27, 2014
    ISBN9781408851883
    Unavailable
    The Prince's Boy
    Author

    Paul Bailey

    Paul Bailey is an award-winning writer whose novels include At The Jerusalem, which won a Somerset Maugham Award and an Arts Council Writers' Award; Peter Smart's Confessions and Gabriel's Lament, both shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction; Sugar Cane, a sequel to Gabriel's Lament, Kitty and Virgil and most recently, Uncle Rudolf. He is the recipient of the E. M. Forster Award and the George Orwell Memorial Award, and has also written and presented features for radio. Paul Bailey lives in London.

    Read more from Paul Bailey

    Related to The Prince's Boy

    Related ebooks

    General Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Ghost Girl, Banana

      Aug 21, 2023

      By the time I was 25, there were only two things I remembered about Mumma. The first was that she smelled of watermelons, the second was that we were happy. We’d taken our father’s name of course, but a name is only half a story. The other half exist

      6 min read

    • Article

      Nugrybauti

      Apr 24, 2019

      Nugrybauti
      8 min read

    • Article

      Life In The past Lane

      Aug 27, 2021

      Life In The past Lane
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Leather Coat

      Apr 4, 2024

      The Leather Coat
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Inherited Imagination

      Aug 18, 2020

      The Inherited Imagination
      9 min read

    • Article

      Jan Morris

      Jun 15, 2018

      I have always rather envied the poet Ovid, who was banished from Rome by the emperor Augustus, you may remember, to a remote place called Tomis on the shores of the Black Sea. There he died, ten years later, and his exile has gone into legend and int

      17 min read

    • Article

      A short BREAK

      Apr 16, 2024

      A short BREAK
      5 min read

    • Article

      All Of Us Here

      Jun 4, 2020

      All Of Us Here
      6 min read

    • Article

      A short BREAK

      Jun 2, 2021

      A short BREAK
      5 min read

    • Article

      Poets

      Dec 1, 2020

      Poets
      19 min read

    • Article

      Honeymoon

      Mar 15, 2019

      Honeymoon
      15 min read

    • Article

      Cherubs

      Jul 5, 2023

      Cherubs
      10 min read

    • Article

      Bicentennial Beginnings

      Dec 1, 2023

      Write what you know, the high school guidance counselor said to us 50 years ago. Write about your passions and your loves, your books and your goals. I wrote about my love of the English language, about Beowulf and kennings, and about how I would try

      8 min read

    • Article

      Notes on Etiquette

      Mar 1, 2019

      Notes on Etiquette
      10 min read

    • Article

      Now Is the Time

      Nov 24, 2020

      Now Is the Time
      5 min read

    • Article

      Roundtrip For One

      Nov 1, 2019

      Roundtrip For One
      5 min read

    • Article

      Diary, 1988

      Mar 15, 2022

      On November 16, 1989, I phoned the Soviet embassy in Paris and asked to speak to Mr. S. The switchboard operator did not reply. After a long silence, a woman’s voice said: “You know, Mr. S. returned to Moscow yesterday.” I immediately hung up. I felt

      17 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems by Rohan Chhetri

      Sep 8, 2020

      All summer the half voice lurked behind me & I played deaf for days for to live To not write about it to use my body Part the river’s flesh to operate Machinery is human too to love & for once stay awake through it all. Now it comes like the deer sle

      3 min read

    • Article

      As the World Collapses

      Jul 27, 2017

      As the World Collapses
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Last Friend on Earth

      May 4, 2023

      It was as if Doreen Saunders had been waiting for me, passing the time until my arrival. She might as well have been sitting in a rocking chair, knitting needles clicking, jam tarts cooling on the side, the door wide open, waiting for the next visito

      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Prince's Boy

    4/5

    5 ratings2 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      Captivating little book of a young man from Bucharest who travels to Paris and discovers himself (and his sexuality) in 1927. His story, one of finding the love of his life, is bigger in its brevity - saying so much in the jewel-like aspect of what is not said. The darker moments remind us of what coming out could be all about prior to these latter days of liberating freedom. The confessional nature of the pseudo-memoir should jar us out of any of the lingering guilt we might feel as perverts.
    • 3/5
      I won a copy of this book here on Goodreads.

      In some ways this was a wonderful book, in others it was pompous—trying far too hard to be what it is. In the wonderful column are a host of colourful characters, a strong, abiding love and some great writing.

      However, I struggled to really get into the narrative. I found the dialogue almost unbearably stiff. It was purposefully so, for sure, since the characters are mostly of the upper-crust and thus constrained by the dictates and decorum of polite society. But I still found it unnatural to read.

      The whole thing felt very much like a poorly done costume drama, set in the mid twenties. It tries so hard to be Paris in the 20s that it just comes off as an archetype of that time and place, rather than a believable story set there. Everyone is fashionably morose, maudlin and mawkish, voguishly liberated, libatious, and lascivious (or not), etc. Alternatively, perhaps it was striving to mimic the gravitas of the literary greats Dinu is so found of reading. But, again, it just felt forced.

      I did appreciate that, while there are small joys here, this is an incredibly sad story and Bailey has allowed his characters the freedom to wallow in it. He never gives in to the popular pressure to provide everyone a sacrosanct happy ending. I also found something immensely gratifying in considering how The Prince's gift to his boy was also so very cruel, though Razvan could never regret receiving it. It's a testament to the duplicity of human nature, for sure.

      I think that there is a lot to recommend this book to the right reader. I just don't know if I was that reader.