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  • Published: 28 September 2021
  • ISBN: 9780241464137
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $22.99

In Youth is Pleasure




A gay classic coming-of-age novel and an unforgettable slice of British interwar upper-middle class life

Orvil Pym does not fit in. A waifish, eccentric, sensitive fifteen-year-old, he hates school and longs to be alone. Spending his Summer holidays in a genteel Surrey hotel with his mysterious father and two brothers who don't understand him, he explores ancient churches, spies on a man rowing in the river and collects antiques, escaping into his own singular aesthetic world. First published in 1945, this is an unforgettable portrayal of a young man's sensuous coming-of-age.

  • Published: 28 September 2021
  • ISBN: 9780241464137
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 192
  • RRP: $22.99

Praise for In Youth is Pleasure

The writer who most directly influenced my work ... he makes the reader aware of the magic that is right under his eyes

William Burroughs

A heightened, sensual journey ... it is Orvil's vibrant energy that allows this book to bubble ... beautifully odd ... spectacular

The Independent

Maybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton Welch's In Youth Is Pleasure. Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger

John Waters

Unlike any other person I had come across, Welch seemed to be speaking particularly to me

Alan Bennett

Britain's Marcel Proust

The Times

Underpinning it is an exquisite balance of pain and beauty - an aspect of the sublime - as Welch brings to vivid life the existence lost to him for ever ... he is surprising us still

John Self, Guardian