Adelphos

Adelphos is the story of a growing personal crisis enveloping Beccles Ede, a final-year student in General Arts at a Montreal university in the winter of 1962-3. Haunted by memories of his Olde-Worlde childhood and schooling – he emigrated to Canada as a thirteen-year-old – and of his struggle through his teens to win acceptance by his New-World peers, Beccles is disillusioned with the university and dubious about the career in the city he sees it preparing him for. As the story opens, however, he’s transformed by a romantic liaison he’s recently struck up with the feisty Cassandra Roberts, a white student from Jamaica. She may only have cost him a pint of blood – as he tells himself soon after he meets her at a campus donor drive – but it is the roller-coaster relationship he forms with her, in conjunction with his membership of Gamma Chi, a campus fraternity with its mystic rituals and dark internal politics and its close association with the ruthless world of city business and finance that he fears awaits him, which forms the basis of the story and drives it to its climax.

Adelphos is a historical novel aimed at the reader who enjoys descriptive writing and a steadily-evolving story-line featuring different strands interweaving fact and fantasy. Exposing the social and moral ethos of the fifties and early sixties, it will be attractive to readers familiar with that era on both sides of the Atlantic. The current relevance of its sub-themes, however – the struggle to emerge from a sheltered single-parent childhood, loyalty and betrayal in peer relationships, the search for self-expression in an oppressively conformist and materialistic society, and the confusion which comes from being born into one world and struggling for identity in another – mean that Adelphos will also appeal to a wider readership.