Adams Breed

Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and the Femina Vie Heureuse prize for best English novel

He must escape.

Illegitimate and orphaned, Gian-Luca is brought up by his Italian grandparents in their prosperous salumeria in Old Compton Street, Soho. Here, surrounded by plenty - by bottles of Chianti in straw petticoats, by pasta and garlic, strings of sausages and jars of dark olives - he lacks that more important sustenance of the soul.

A stranger in the land of his birth, denied religious identity and human love, Gian-Luca grows to maturity seeking to resolve a terrible conflict between the needs of his spirit and the demands of the material world.

In the acclaimed Adam's Breed Gian-Luca becomes disgusted with his job and goes to live in the forest as a hermit, with devastating consequences.

Praise for Adam's Breed

'A tender, deeply moving, and beautifully written story' - Daily Telegraph

Radclyffe Hall was born on the south coast of England to an abusive mother and a playboy father. After this unhappy childhood, she inherited their estate and from then on was free to travel and live as she chose. She fell in love and lived with an older woman before settling down with Una Troubridge, a married sculptor. Her novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) was banned in the U.K. until 1948, but is now hailed as a classic of lesbian literature. She wrote many other acclaimed novels, short story collections, and poetry collections.


Genre: Literary Fiction