Sandel: A Novel

'Here is a controlled and beautifully written love story . . . this is a superb stylistic feat.' --New Statesman 'Mr Stewart has really succeeded with this young character, and in depicting a love which truly exists and is not despicable.' --The Sunday Telegraph 'The writing is always intelligent, its sensual quality surprisingly beautiful.' --The Times Set in the 1960s in an Oxford college, when being gay was still an offence punishable by imprisonment, 'Sandel' tells the story of a love affair between an undergraduate (David Rogers), and a cathedral choir boy (Antony Sandel). Tony - beautiful, provocative, mischievous, sensitive and sometimes overwhelmed by the intensity of his own feelings - bewitches Rogers. Both are talented musicians. Sandel's astonishing voice is soon central to the relationship. Sensual, profound, often funny and never sentimental, Stewart provides a definitive analysis of same-sex love in the context of a relationship that puts sex in its place and reveals love as the one agent of the human condition that can set us free. 'Sandel' became formative reading for a generation of boys growing up in the 1970s who knew their feelings fell outside the heterosexual male stereotype. But its message holds good for all people in all eras whatever their sexual persuasion. The setting places 'Sandel' in a tradition made famous by Evelyn Waugh. There are echoes too of 'Maurice' by E M Forster. Angus Stewart was born in 1936, the son of John Innes Mackintosh Stewart, the novelist and Oxford academic who wrote bestselling crime fiction as Michael Innes. His first published work was 'The Stile', which won the Richard Hillary Memorial Prize. After 'Sandel' he wrote a second novel, 'Snow in Harvest' and a travel diary, 'Tangier: A Writer's Notebook'. A third novel, 'The Wind Cries All Ways', which includes a startling description of a man's incarceration in a Tangier mental asylum, has never been published. He died in 1999.