The Oxford Circus: A Novel of Oxford and Youth

Gaveston ffoulis arrives at Oxford with a name spelled in the old way and a head full of ambitions. He insists on a hansom cab when a taxi would do the job, and this small act of social performance announces a young man performing an identity he's not entirely sure he deserves. Through Gaveston's eyes, we enter the rituals of university life: the friendships that shape him, the intellectual pretensions he cultivates, and the particular loneliness of being surrounded by equals. The novel captures a transitional moment in British youth, post-war and pre-Depression, when old certainties about class and identity were dissolving but had not yet vanished. Gaveston's nostalgia for his mother, his artistic visions, his friendship with David Paunceford these form the emotional core of a book more interested in the texture of being young and uncertain than in dramatic action. It endures because it understands that the most significant battles are often the ones fought silently, within oneself.