Belchamber
  • Published: 15 March 2008
  • ISBN: 9781590172667
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $34.00

Belchamber

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Charles Edwin William Augustus Chambers—Marquis and Earl of Belchamber, Viscount Charmington, and Baron St. Edmunds and Chambers—known familiarly as Sainty, is the scion of an ancient English aristocratic family. Behind him stretches a rogues’ gallery of picturesque upper-crust scoundrels. But he is uninterested in riding to hounds or drinking or whoring in the great tradition of his forebears, and though he admires his tough-minded puritanical Scottish mother, he lacks her unrelenting moral self-assurance. Sainty is instead a sensitive soul, physically delicate, sexually timid, intellectually inclined, utterly honest, and thoroughly decent, but constitutionally incapable of asserting himself. When it comes to assuming the responsibilities of his inheritance, to managing his feckless younger brother Albert or fathoming his sly cousin Clyde, and, above all, to the essential business of marrying and continuing the family line, Sainty hasn’t a prayer.
  • Published: 15 March 2008
  • ISBN: 9781590172667
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $34.00
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Praise for Belchamber

  • "A strong novel...of upperclass English society, and has a most lovable and sympathetic hero, whose life from childhood up is skillfully portrayed." -The Dial
  • "As a story the thing holds the reader pretty hard--perhaps by the force of the truth that is in it...there's a sort of old-fashioned touch about some of it, and now and then a suggestion of Thackeray." -New York Times
  • "Neither strength nor style is lacking in this quite remarkable study..." -Outlook
  • "He has shown us, in firm, clear strokes, the tragedy of the trivial...how the susceptibilities of a tender and serious spirit, hampered by physical infirmity, may be crushed and trampled under foot in the mad social race for luxury and amusement." -The Bookman
  • "Belchamber deserves to take its places as a true, if minor, classic, for it is a work of imagination, deeply felt, truly observed, and achieved with a sense of style and architecture." -Gerard Hopkins
  • "Not only one of the strongest books I have read in years, but so beautifully written. It made an amazing impression on me and haunted me for days." -Emma Eames