In the Making

Ten-year-old Randal Thane is distressed to be taken from his mother, his governess and his home and sent to prep school. But once there, he discovers an adult world he had never before imagined, and falls unwillingly but entirely under the spell of a charismatic older boy, Felton, who will introduce him to all the pleasures, pains and perplexities of first love. A unique, enchanting and complicated coming-of-age story about the passion between two young boys, In the Making is widely hailed as G. F. Green's masterpiece, and is now in print for the first time since its original publication in 1952.

The most neglected writer of his generation, Pure, tense, and incontrovertibly a modern classic

G.F. Green was born in Derbyshire in 1911. His short stories of working-class life in the industrial North of England were published in volume form as Land Without Heroes (1948). During the war he served in what was then Ceylon in the commander-in-chief's public relations department. In 1944 he was court-martialled, cashiered and sentenced to two years' imprisonment for homosexual offences. He suffered a breakdown after his release from Wakefield Prison. He edited an anthology of stories on the theme of childhood, First View (1950), and completed a novel, In the Making (1952). In 1957 he settled in Somerset and, after a long silence, published a triptych of novellas, The Power of Sergeant Streater (1972). He died in 1977.Peter Parker is the author of two books on the First World War, The Old Lie (1987) and The Last Veteran (2009), and biographies of J.R. Ackerley (1989) and Christopher Isherwood (2004). He edited A Reader's Guide to the Twentieth-Century Novel (1995) and A Reader's Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers (1996). He is a regular contributor of book reviews and features to numerous newspapers and magazines and collaborated on the script for the animated film of J.R.Ackerley's book My Dog Tulip, released in 2010.