The Warmth From His Face: A Novel of Obsession

Thomas Hennessy turned his back on the Catholic Church. The reasons were several; he did not, at eighteen, fully understand any of them.Sent from Dublin to an English public school in 1948, after a beating at the Christian Brothers, the fourteen-year-old Thomas sat down in his second week of Latin beside a boy who quietly corrected an error without looking up. The boy was Sebastian Cavendish - beautiful, aristocratic, oblivious. Over four years Thomas watched him, lived on fragments of his attention, and stopped praying in the Latin his father had taught him. In May 1952, on his father's signed consent, Thomas was received into the Anglican Church.On the last afternoon of school, Sebastian put his hand briefly to Thomas's cheek. Then the waiting began.Two years later, in his third year reading Greats at Oxford, Thomas walked to Sebastian's rooms at Christ Church and asked, at last, for what he had wanted since he was a schoolboy - in the hope that the having of it would end the wanting.He was given it.It did not.The Warmth From His Face is a literary novel about the quiet damage one person can do in another's life simply by being what he is, and about the disproportion between a life and the small ordinary moment that decides it.For readers of Alan Hollinghurst's The Folding Star, Colm Tóibín's The Master, André Aciman's Call Me By Your Name, and Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day.Contains some sexual content. For adult readers.

Pagina's: 248, Paperback, Independently published