Synopses & Reviews
Twelve-year-old Fee is a gifted Korean-American soprano in a boys' choir in Maine whose choir director reveals himself to be a serial pedophile. Fee and his friends are forced to bear grief, shame, and pain that endure long after the director is imprisoned. Fee survives even as his friends do not, but a deep-seated horror and dread accompany him through his self-destructive college days and after, until the day he meets a beautiful young student named Warden and is forced to confront the demons of his brutal past.
Review
"A coming-of-age novel in the grand Romantic tradition, where passions run high, Cupid stalks Psyche, and love shares the dance floor with death . . . A lovely, nuanced, never predictable portrait of a creative soul in the throes of becoming." -The Washington Post Book World
"Edinburgh has the force of a dream and the heft of a life. And Alexander Chee is a brilliant new writer."-Annie Dillard
"Alexander Chee gets my vote for the best new novelist I've read in some time. Edinburgh is moody, dramatic-and pure." -Edmund White
"Haunting . . . complex . . . sophisticated . . . [Chee] says volumes with just a few incendiary words." -The New York Times Book Review
"Chee describes [Fee's] desperate adolescent moments with heartbreaking clarity and grace . . . Few coming-of-age novels truly stir one's emotions or lead readers to consider the traumas of their own lives. Edinburgh does both." -Newsday
About the Author
Alexander Chee's work has appeared in
Interview,
Big,
Out, and in the anthologies
Boys Like Us, Loss Within Loss, Men on Men 2000, and
His 3. He teaches at the New School.