Scissors: A Novel of Youth

In the early years of the twentieth century, a boy called Scissors begins his journey between worlds. Born to an English family in the steam-heated provinces of Ottoman Turkey, young John Narcissus Dean navigates a childhood of breathtaking strangeness: the thunder of the Black Sea, the labyrinthine streets of Amasia, and a friendship with a Turkish boy named Ali that crosses language and culture with startling intimacy. When tragedy steals his mother, Scissors is wrenched from everything he knows and sent alone to the cold stone corridors of an English boarding school, where he must learn to be English again, or perhaps for the first time. What follows is a tender, unsentimental portrait of the cruelties and wonders of growing up: the anguish of alienation, the fierce loyalty of boyhood bonds, and the particular loneliness of a child who belongs nowhere and everywhere at once. Cecil Roberts writes with vivid sensory precision and deep emotional honesty about that most universal of losses: the childhood we must leave behind.