Description

A solitary, dreaming boy is sent to a celebrated boarding school that worships games, conformity, and worldly success. He withers under its cruelties and smug pieties, sustained only by memories of a lost home and by glimpses of a radiance the people around him cannot see. As he grows, an inheritance reaches him out of the first dim centuries of British Christianity: the rumour of the Holy Grail, and a faith older and stranger than anything taught in chapel. It draws him out of ordinary life and toward an ecstasy his elders can only call madness.

By turns a savage satire of the modern schoolroom and a rapturous vision of the unseen, the story follows a soul convinced that the visible world is a thin veil stretched over an unbearable glory — and willing to follow that conviction to its furthest and most costly end.