Prodigal — Charles Lambert

Shortlisted for the Polari Prize 2019

'A writer who never ceases to surprise' Jenny Offill

Meet Jeremy, a hapless fifty-something who is scraping together a living in Paris writing soft-core pornography as 'Nathalie Cray'. 

When his all-but-estranged sister tells him their father is dying, he reluctantly travels back to his parental home in the English countryside. Confronted with a life he had always sought to escape, Jeremy begins an emotionally fraught journey into his family's chequered past â€" back to the unexpected death of his mother in a provincial Greek hospital years earlier, and even further back, to the moment at which the Eldritch family fell apart.

A bold take on the queer coming-of-age story, Prodigal deftly reconsiders everything we think we know about the nature of trust, death, and what we do to each other in the name of love.