The Prince's Boy: A Novel

About this book

In May 1927 nineteen-year-old Dinu Grigorescu a skinny boy with literary ambitions is newly arrived in Paris. He has been sent from Bucharest the city of his childhood by his wealthy father to embark upon a bohemian adventure and relish the unique pleasures of Parisian life. An innocent in a new city still grieving the sudden loss of his beloved mother Elena seven years earlier Dinu is encouraged to enjoy la vie de Bohme by his distant cousin Eduard. But tentatively secretly Dinu is drawn to the Bains du Ballon dAlsace a notorious establishment rumored to offer the men of Paris married or otherwise who enjoy something different everything they crave. It is here that he meets Razvan a fellow Romanian the adopted child of a man of refinement-a princes boy-whose stories of Proust and other artists entrance Dinu and who will become the young mans teacher in the ways of the world. At a distance of forty years and written in London his refuge from the horrors of Europes early-twentieth-century history Dinus memoir of his brief spell in Paris is one of exploration and rediscovery. The love that blossomed that sunlit day in such inauspicious and unromantic surroundings would transcend lust separation despair and even death to endure a lifetime. This is a work of extraordinary sensual delicacy an exquisite novel from one of our most celebrated writers.