The Boy in the Rain

4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars | 343 ratings

Price: 21.49

Last update: 01-30-2025


About this item

It is 1903 in the English countryside when Robbie, a shy young art student, meets the twenty-nine-year-old Anton who is running from memories of his brutal childhood and failed marriage. Within months, they begin a love affair that will never let them go. Robbie grows into an accomplished portraitist in the vivid London art world with the help of Anton's enchanting former wife, while Anton turns from his inherited wealth and connections to improve the conditions of the poor. But it is the Edwardian Era, and the law sentences homosexual men to prison with hard labor, following the tragic experience of Oscar Wilde. As Robbie and Anton's commitment to each other grows, the world about them turns to a more dangerous place.


Top reviews from the United States

  • Linda Reads
    5.0 out of 5 stars M/M romance during early 20th century…poignant and sometimes painful
    Reviewed in the United States on June 1, 2023
    Superlative storytelling albeit realistic and that’s all I’m going to say about that.
    This book is told in five books, each having multiple chapters told with a title instead of a number. When I saw one of the titles later in the book, I became fearful for our wonderful couple.
    Orphan and 18yo Robbie was working for his uncle as a tailor’s apprentice of sorts, which he hated. He would rather draw things, people, anything. After a very mean event, his uncle sends him away to stay in a little village named Nottinghamshire to live with an old vicar and tutor. George Langstaff has tutored many a boy to prepare for the rigors of university. Robbie discovers his homosexual feelings when he meets almost 30yo Anton Harrington, one of the vicar’s former pupils. It doesn’t take too long for Anton to give into his feelings toward Rob. Life seems idyllic until Anton’s wife wants to get back together after their mutual separation.
    This is a book to read and cherish so my telling you more would just ruin the story. If you like well-told stories with meaningful events and wonderful characters, of a time much different to today, please try this book. It is poignant, poetic prose. I felt like I knew these two men. When I wasn’t reading this book, I was thinking about it. I volunteered to review an ARC of this book through NetGalley. I say this book is beyond five-stars-good.
  • Santa Fe Avid Reader
    4.0 out of 5 stars Wishes for more
    Reviewed in the United States on December 21, 2024
    A good story or, rather, a good draft of a story, for me. I would have liked more detailed narrative, more explanation of what happened when the story jumped forward in time.
    That said, I think the two main characters weee presented well, with angst and world view appropriate to their individual ages and experience. I understood their perspectives and their frustrations with themselves and each other.
    An engaging read.
  • Carolyn Jack
    5.0 out of 5 stars The danger of forbidden love made real
    Reviewed in the United States on January 7, 2025
    Stephanie Cowell has accomplished something quite rare in her historical novel, “The Boy in the Rain.” Throughout this absorbing story of two young, Edwardian-period, British men in love, she channels like a medium not only the constantly changing emotional weather of each lover’s individual feelings and of their shared misgivings and raptures as a tentative couple, but also the fraught mindset and spirit of an entire era.

    Even at a time when the cruelty of homophobia is still with us and its pain continues very fresh, it’s likely hard for many of us to imagine what levels of fear and agonized longing must have tortured non-heterosexual people a century ago. The desire to live and love in the open, without paranoia, persecution or shame, can only have been overwhelming and devastating. With great sensitivity, Cowell renders her characters as if she had color, sound and a time tunnel with which to animate her prose. Through the experience she so skillfully creates, the reader lives the whole vibrant spectrum of Robbie’s and Anton’s lives, from the pleasant moments of ordinary days in the English countryside to the extremes of joy, terror and suffering their love and a punitive society bring them. That a thin dark line of constant dread runs through it all, like a thread the Fates could cut at any moment, vividly conveys a real sense of the omnipresent danger that did and does shadow the lives of so many identifying as LGBTQ. Cowell’s empathy for them resonates with a depth that moves the reader to the core.
  • Ithacan
    5.0 out of 5 stars Delicate and Brutal
    Reviewed in the United States on June 10, 2024
    In The Boy in the Rain, novelist Stephanie Cowell takes us back to Edwardian England, and follows the intense, joyful and conflicted love affair between two men. The younger, a mostly penniless aspiring artist, and his lover, a landowner ten years his senior. The UK laws against gross indecencies are harsh and hover over the world of the novel--two years of hard labor in hellish prisons, and for those who survive, social ruin. Cowell handles the characters--who are rich and nuanced and complex--like a master, and she immerses the reader deeply in turn-of-the-century London and the English countryside. The filth and stench of Whitechapel, the flowers in the drawing rooms of Mayfair. The Boy in the Rain is brilliant--delicate and brutal--and is an entirely immersive, compelling read. One of the finest historical novels this reader has read in years.
  • D. Cellini
    3.0 out of 5 stars The author has a wonderful, descriptive style.
    Reviewed in the United States on September 15, 2024
    I came to appreciate the chara ters, but failed to understand the ending.
  • Stuart L
    4.0 out of 5 stars Nice Historic piece of Gay Life
    Reviewed in the United States on July 7, 2024
    I liked the story of this character and I felt it was true to the time period and setting - I really liked being in this character's mind and felt like hearing the inner voice was great - It gave us a feel for what the timeperiod's effects on this character's thinking would have been. I felt the love story could have been more exposed more - The way it was done felt too much like this was done for a physical exchange of "love" and it really did not humanize the character(s).

    The portrayal of the dark sexual bits was not treated in a realistic way.

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