Longlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize, The Hand-Reared Boy was the first literary novel to honestly, and explicitly, explore the sexual awakening of a young man.

Quite shocking when first published in 1970, it is now considered a classic.

It is the first book in the Horatio Stubbs Trilogy.

Brian says: “Young Horatio Stubbs suffers the pangs of adolescence, but is weaned from the pleasures of masturbation by the delights offered by his school’s nursing sister, who is not all she seems. The novel became a great scandal in England, where it was rejected by thirteen publishers, and caused a lawsuit – as a result of which it became a bestseller.”