Dimensions
128 x 197 x 23mm
Set in 1920s Chicago, this novel tells the story of the friendship between two teenage boys: the newcomer Spud Latham, brimming with energy and physical belligerence, and the scholar, Lymie Peters, heading for an academic life and no good at games. Spud’s family becomes a refuge for Lymie, whose mother has died and whose father drinks too much. Their friendship survives the rituals of teenage life and, at university, they share a room in a boarding house. There Lymie introduces Spud to Sally Forbes and the unexamined harmony of their relationship begins to disintegrate. Maxwell’s rites-of-passage novel about two very different boys growing up and then growing apart has all the delicacy and precision that his admirers know so well. So acute are his insights into the psychology of friendship that The Folded Leaf, more than fifty years after first publication, remains one of modern literature’s finest portraits of adolescence.
