Rowan Thornwell, R. J. Thornwell

1973 (A Man Of Substance, #1) (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Some boys come of age. Others survive it.

Wagga Wagga, Australia. 1973. Thirteen-year-old Christian Tambor knows the rules of survival: stay quiet, stay small, stay out of the way. The belt stays on its hook, until it doesn't. His stepfather's calm voice carries more threat than a raised fist ever could. His mother disappears into her cigarettes. And Christian? He disappears into silence.

The war in Vietnam is ending. Pink Floyd plays on someone's radio. Bruce Lee has just died. The world is shifting, but in Christian's house, nothing moves except the shadows. He spends his days clipping newspaper stories, dodging bruises, and haunting the corners of the town library, aching for something he doesn't yet have the language to name.

Then Mary arrives. Barefoot. Fierce. Unafraid. She sees Christian in a way no one else ever has. She asks questions he's never dared to answer. With her, a different kind of boyhood begins to take shape. One where touch doesn't mean pain. One where truth feels possible.

But Wagga is not kind to boys who hesitate. It does not forgive softness. Or hunger. Or difference.

Set against the flickering unrest of 1970s rural Australia, 1973 is a poetic and emotionally raw coming-of-age novel about the quiet brutality of queer repression, and the soft, fragile rebellions that keep a boy alive. For readers who ache for stories like On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Shuggie Bain, and A Little Life.

What you'll find in 1973:

- A queer coming-of-age story in working-class Australia - A boy who feels everything and says almost nothing - SkyLab, Bruce Lee, and Pink Floyd as emotional texture - A friendship that borders on salvation - Lyrical prose exploring trauma, tenderness, and queer longing - A library that saves a boy's life

Content advisory: This novel contains depictions of domestic violence, emotional abandonment, and the silencing of queer youth. It also holds moments of unexpected grace. A frog named Albert. A poem that arrives like a breath held too long. And a boy who begins to wonder if softness was never weakness, but survival all along.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Rowan Thornwell
• Erscheinungstermin: 24. Oktober 2025
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781764279932
• Artikelnr.: 75746060

Autorenporträt

Rowan Thornwell writes with the precision of a blade and the hunger of a man who's gone too long without touch. Years spent in the Navy taught him how to stay silent, how to fold longing into the shape of obedience, but it didn't teach him how to forget. His stories are the aftermath: dark, aching, and unapologetically intimate.

At the heart of Rowan's work is the slow unraveling of men, men bound by shame, by duty, by the things they were taught never to want. His prose walks the line between literature and lust, stitching bruised poetry into scenes of surrender, domination, and the dangerous kind of knowing. In his hands, sexual awakening becomes a battleground: sometimes dream, sometimes nightmare, always real.

Rowan writes for those who've loved in silence, craved in shadow, and dared to believe that what breaks you might also set you free.