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A moving coming-of-age novel based on the author's adolescent experiences in China At sixteen, Denton Welch was attending school in Derbyshire, England. One morning, instead of taking the train to school, he caught a bus traveling in the opposite direction with no real plan except to start a new adventure. Although he reluctantly returned to school at his family's bidding, he soon received a letter postmarked from Shanghai-a letter from his father suggesting that Denton join him China. So began a momentous journey that would shape young Denton Welch's life. Leaving behind his companions at school as well as the life he had known, he traveled across the globe to China, where he was seized with a sense of wonder completely new to him. It was there, so far from his roots, that young Denton began to explore his ambitions, aspirations, and secret desires. Written with an artist's keen sensibility for observation and inspired by J. R. Ackerley's Hindoo Holiday, Maiden Voyage is an unforgettable tale of growing up and discovering oneself.
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Reviews
"Pursued fiercely enough, every literary vice becomes admirable. . . . Denton Welch is the champion of preciousness. [His] childlike honesty about his desires has made him something of a gay writer's gay writer, praised by W. H. Auden, William S. Burroughs and Edmund White."
The New York Times Book Review
"Are we not all, emotionally, what Mr. Welch is in fact orphans, each traveling alone on a journey which, if it is headed in the direction of unknown dangers, at least is leading one away from the fears one knows?"
W. H. Auden
"Denton Welch's subject matter had a richness and a colour that links him with very unlike writers, such as Dylan Thomas, Edith Sitwell and Christopher Fry, all of whom were standing out against the drabness of their times."
W. H. Auden