{"product_id":"the-folding-star-a-novel","title":"The Folding Star: A Novel","description":"\u003cp\u003eEdward Manners - thirty-three  disaffected  in search of a new life - has come to an ancient Flemish city to teach English. Almost at once he falls in love with one of his pupils  the seventeen-year-old Luc Altidore  recently expelled from school for some mysterious offense. Condemned to a mounting but incommunicable obsession with the boy  Edward becomes involved in affairs with two other men: one a heartless but seductive fraud  the other a young drifter with a deeply possessive streak. Then Edward is introduced to the world of the enigmatic and reclusive Symbolist painter Edgard Orst. Gradually he is drawn toward an understanding of the artists own obsession with a famous actress  drowned off Ostend at the turn of the century  and of the ambiguous circumstances of Orsts own death under Nazi occupation. The events of The Folding Star are played out amid the silent streets and canals of a city that seems locked in the past  and across the northern landscape of out-of-season resorts and abandoned houses that lies beyond. But in the central panel of the novels triptych Edward returns home for a funeral and is caught up in memories of his own late adolescence and his first love affair: an English pastoral already threatened by the experience of betrayal and loss.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44983995727925,"sku":"ByrdShop_0679436057","price":30.93,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780679436058.jpg?v=1770818360","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-folding-star-a-novel","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}