Set in 1960s' Oxford in the wake of the Wolfenden Report, when being gay was an offence punishable by imprisonment, Sandel tells the story of a love affair between David Rogers, a 19-year-old undergraduate, and Antony Sandel, a 13-year-old cathedral choir boy.

Sandel – beautiful, provocative, mischievous, sensitive and sometimes overwhelmed by the intensity of his own feelings – bewitches Rogers. Both are talented musicians, and Sandel’s astonishing voice, which Rogers explores as his accompanist at the transient moment of glory which precedes it breaking, is soon central to the relationship.

Sensual, profound, often funny and never sentimental, Angus Stewart, like Nabokov with Lolita, dares to set love free in a relationship that flies in the face of convention and the law.

The original edition of Sandel was a bestseller in 1968 and became formative reading for a generation of boys growing up in the 1970s who knew their feelings fell outside the heterosexual male stereotype. The writer Stephen Fry, a teenager at the time, lists Angus Stewart among those who opened his eyes to his homosexual identity, alongside Oscar Wilde, Gide, Genet, Auden, Orton, Norman Douglas, Ronald Firbank, H. Montgomery Hyde, and Roger Peyrefitte. Out of print for some years until the present edition, its cult status raised prices on Amazon to hundreds of dollars a copy in America and ultimately in the UK to £1,965 a copy. The novel was recently adapted for the stage by Glenn Chandler and was premiered in 2013, playing to audiences at the Edinburgh Festival and subsequently in London.

Reviews

‘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.’ Sunday Telegraph

‘The writing is always intelligent, its sensual quality surprisingly beautiful.’ The Times

‘Mr Stewart is a coolly witty writer.’ Sunday Times

About the Author

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. He was educated at Bryanston School in Dorset, England, and later at Christ Church Oxford, loosely disguised as St Cecilia’s in Sandel, which is in many aspects autobiographical. His first published work was ‘The Stile’, which appeared in the 1964 Faber anthology and won the Richard Hillary Memorial Prize in 1965. His breakthrough came in 1968 with Sandel. In that year Stewart moved to Tangier in Morocco. His experiences there resulted in a second novel, Snow in Harvest (1969), and a travel diary entitled Tangier: A Writer’s Notebook (1977). After his mother’s death in 1979 Stewart returned to live in England, and died in Oxfordshire twenty years later.