Beloved of artists and writers from Edith Sitwell to William Burroughs and John Waters, Denton Welch freights the everyday with surgical perception and homoerotic longing

Maiden Voyage is an account of author Denton Welch's sixteenth year, when he ran away from his English public school and was then sent to Shanghai to live with his father. The book was Welch's first and created a sensation on publication in 1943; its frank description of public schoolboy life forced publisher Herbert Read to initially seek advice from libel lawyers. Even Winston Churchill's private secretary gossiped in a letter that, "the book was reeking with homosexuality? I think I must get it." Today, Welch's expressions of sexuality may seem more demure than outrageous, but his portrayal of the passions and humiliations of adolescence is graphic. As in all of Welch's novels, it is the precisely realized details of the author's physical and social surroundings that make the book such a remarkable journey.

Nicely turned autobiographical record of a 13-year old's year in China, though it's not quite the young Evelyn Waugh-Aubrey Beardsley the publishers claim. He ran away from boarding school to spend five days in search of cathedrals, and agreed to go back for one term only, and then is invited by his father to Shanghai. He was on his own pretty much of the time; he looked for collector's items by day, roved the streets at night, takes a trip into the interior with another avid collector, spends one night in a brothel and others at missions. His is a record of a search for experience as well as objets d'art - pleasant memoirs of observant youth. (Kirkus Reviews)