John Boyne
The Absolutist
(Other Press, July 2012)
Amazon Best Books of the Month, July 2012
Longlisted for the 2013 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
An Amazon.com Best 100 Book of 2012
Winner of the Stonewall Honor (Literature)
September 1919: twenty-one-year-old Tristan Sadler takes a train from London to Norwich to deliver some letters to Marian Bancroft. Tristan fought alongside Marian’s brother Will during the Great War, but in 1917 Will laid down his guns on the battlefield, declared himself a conscientious objector and was shot as a traitor, an act which has brought shame and dishonor on the Bancroft family. But the letters are not the real reason for Tristan’s visit. He holds a secret deep in his soul. One that he is desperate to unburden himself of to Marian, if he can only find the courage. As he recalls his friendship with Will, from the training ground at Aldershot to the trenches of Northern France, he speaks of how the intensity of their friendship brought him both happiness and self-discovery as well as despair and pain. The Absolutist is a novel that examines the events of the Great War from the perspective of two young soldiers, both struggling with the complexity of their emotions and the confusion of their friendship.
Praise for The Absolutist
“A novel of immeasurable sadness, in a league with Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. John Boyne is very, very good at portraying the destructive power of a painfully kept secret. This is a forbidden love story—a gay love story—but one with a terrible twist.”
—John Irving
“A wonderful, sad, tender book. There are some amazing things about this novel–one is the simplicity and purity of the narrative line; another is the sort of complexity within the characters and the emotions and the motives; another is the sense of the period, with all its restrictions. The book is going to have an enormous impact on everyone who reads it.”
—Colm Toibin
“This will become a classic war novel.”
—The Bookseller
“Let me try to explain how much I loved The Absolutist. I loved it for its grainy black-and-white-movie feel, like an old British film from the ’40s. I loved that author John Boyne teased out just enough information throughout this book to make me think I’d figured out what had happened to Tristan and Will (I didn’t!). I loved the mixture of horrific brutality and insanely beautiful prose. And I loved the ending, which made me gasp, gasp—and gasp again.”
—Inland Empire Weekly
“The Absolutist is effortlessly readable and meticulously attuned to its social and linguistic time frame.”
—Irish Times
John Boyne was born in Ireland in 1971 and is the author of seven novels for adults and three for children. The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas won two Irish Book Awards, was shortlisted for the British Book Award, reached no.1 on the New York Times Bestseller List and was made into an award-winning Miramax feature film. His novels are published in over 45 languages. He lives in Dublin.