A Boy's Own Story

By the Winner of the National Book Foundation’s 2019 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters

“Every so often a novel comes along that is so ambitious in its intention and so confident of its voice that it reminds us what a singular and potent thing a novel can be. One of these is A Boy’s Own Story.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“With A Boy’s Own Story, American literature is larger by one classic novel.”—The Washington Post

“The story Edmund White tells is spellbinding—by turns incisively satiric, goldenly nostalgic, calmly voluptuous, and throbbing. . . . No reader, straight or gay . . can fail to experience shock after shock of recognition in these pages.”—The Washington Post Book World

“It is any boy’s story. . . . For all I know, it may be any girl’s story as well. . . . It is one of the two or three best novels I’ve read this season.”—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times

“Enchanted, dreamy, elegant and exotic . . . The book touches universal bases with smashing success.”—Publishers Weekly

“White writes with shimmering sensuousness. . . . Balancing the banal and the savage, the funny and the lovely, he achieves a wonderfully poised fiction.”—The New York Times Book Review

“The best American narrative of sexual awakening since Catcher in the Rye.” —Chicago Sun-Times