Edinburgh (novel)

Edinburgh  
Author(s) Alexander Chee
Language English
Genre(s) Novel
Publisher Picador USA
Publication date 2001
Media type Hardback and paperback
Pages 209 pp (hardback edition)
ISBN ISBN 0-312-30503-6 (paperback edition)
OCLC Number 47666550
Dewey Decimal 813/.6 21
LC Classification PS3603.H44 E35 2002

Edinburgh is a debut novel by author Alexander Chee. It is a coming-of-age story about a young boy who experiences, and eventually triumphs over, the damage inflicted by a child molester.

Plot

In the novel, Aphias "Fee" Zhe, a twelve-year-old Korean American boy growing up in Maine, is selected for membership in a boys' choir along with Peter, who becomes his best friend and first love. Fee and other boys are molested by the choir director Big Eric Gorendt. Fee is afraid to tell, and doesn't want anyone else to tell, for reasons that are deeper than pure embarrassment or fear. When one boy comes out with the secret, all the boys are revealed as victims as well. This novel explores the horrific mental and emotional damage these boys go through and how they cope with this trauma.

Critical reception

Edinburgh won the Michener/Copernicus Prize in fiction, the Asian American Writers Workshop Literary Award, the Lambda Editor's Choice Prize, and was named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly.[1] Michael Spinella described it as a "spectacular, gripping, and gut-wrenching tale," in Booklist, and the New York Times Sunday Book Review as "Haunting... complex... sophisticated”

Alexander Chee was a recipient of a 2003 Whiting Writers' Award. Edmund White has said, "Alexander Chee is the best new novelist I've seen in some time."

Footnotes