A Difficult Young Man

Winner, Australian Literature Society Gold Medal in 1956

Nearly everyone between the ages of eighteen and thirty turns against his family and wants to escape from it. When he is sixty he wants to creep back to the nursery fireside, but it is no longer there.

Handsome, proud, reprehensible, misunderstood. Dominic Langton is the dark heart of A Difficult Young Man. His brother Guy can scarcely understand where he fits into the pattern of things or what he might do next. Martin Boyd's much loved novel is an elegant, witty and compelling family tale about the contradictions of growing up.

About the Author

Martin Boyd's first novel,Love Gods, was published in 1925. Three years later The Montforts appeared, under the pseudonym Martin Mills. Following the international success of Lucinda Brayford in 1946 Boyd decided to return to Australia where he wanted to restore his grandfather's house, but by 1951 he was back in London. In the coming decade he was to write the Langton Quartet: The Cardboard Crown, A Difficult Young Man, Outbreak of Love, When Blackbirds Sing. In 1957 he went to Rome, where he lived and continued to write until his death in 1972.