The Marble Boy: A Winter Story

‘Write kindness in marble and injuries in the dust.’ Persian Proverb When Edmund Payne ran from an unfulfilling marriage, and a job as an art school teacher, to tour the rich and evocative Classical landscapes of the Mediterranean, he began an ‘odyssey’ of the heart and the imagination. He was running from suspicions surrounding a relationship with a talented and sensitive schoolboy, but also from the devastation of an affair with a man several years his junior. Haunted by memories of both, Edmund journeyed into exile, excited to revisit a region he knew as a young man, but this time in search of beauty, and hungry for a more lasting love. With a keen eye for line and colour, Edmund used his sketchbooks to record his travels, but it was his notebooks in which he had recorded his relationships, past and present, real, imagined, and longed for, that Edmund used, years later, to tell his story. Lyrical, tender and sexually exhilarating, The Marble Boy is the record of his journey, his imagination, and his search for love. "The Marble Boy is a novel about infatuation and longing: a sensual, sexual pot-boiler of a man waiting to explode, waiting to find true love, waiting to find who he is. It’s a novel brilliantly disguised as a travel book..." (Reader Review) "Anyone who loves Greece will find this assured and finely written novel a nostalgic evocation of that land’s scenery and culture, and it must now deservedly join the different genres of travel as well as romantic literature.” (Reader Review)