CHILDREN OF THE SUN

CHILDREN OF THE SUN
Max Schaefer

1970: Fourteen year old Tony becomes seduced by the skinhead movement, sucked into a world of brutal racist violence and bizarre ritual. It’s a milieu in which he must hide his homosexuality, in which every encounter is potentially explosively risky.

2003: James is a young TV researcher, living with his boyfriend. At a loose end, he begins to research the far right in Britain, and its secret gay membership. He becomes particularly fascinated by Nicky Crane, the leader of the movement who came out as gay before dying of Aids in 1993. The two narrative threads of this extraordinarily assured and ambitious first novel follow Tony through the seventies, eighties and nineties, as the skinhead movement splinters and weakens, and James through a year in which he becomes dangerously immersed in his research.

256 pages, paperback