How I Spent My Summer Holidays

About this book

When How I Spent My Summer Holidays was first published in 1981 a Western reviewer wrote: If Who Has Seen the Wind told the story of a young boys coming to terms with death How I Spent My Summer Holidays tells of a young mans attempt to come to terms with his own sexuality and that of the world around him. The twelve-year-old young man is Hugh and in small-town Saskatchewan it is the hot summer of 1924. When Hugh and his friends dig a secret cave out on the Prairie they soon find it occupied by an escaped patient from the mental hospital. Defying the adult world the boys become involved with a former war hero and current rum-runner King Motherwell in sheltering and feeding the runaway. When passions aroused by sex explode into murder Hugh leaves his boyhood behind him for ever.