H. S. Cross returns to "a school as nuanced and secretive as J. K. Rowling's Hogwarts" (The Rumpus) in Age of Grace, the sequel to her coming-of-age novel Wilberforce.St. Stephen's Academy, Yorkshire, 1931. A world unto itself, populated by boys reveling in life's first big mistakes and men still learning how to live with the consequences of their own. They live a cloistered life, exotic to modern eyes, founded upon privilege, ruled by byzantine and often unspoken laws, haunted by injuries both casual and calculated. Yet within those austere corridors can be found windows of enchantment, unruly love, and a wild sort of freedom, all vanished, it seems, from our world.Told from a variety of viewpoints—including that of unhappy Housemaster John Grieves—Age of Grace takes us deep inside the crucible of St. Stephen's while retaining a clear-eyed, contemporary sensibility, drawing out the urges and even mercies hidden beneath the...

At St. Stephen's Academy, the students are on the verge of revolt. While the younger boys plot an insurrection, the older ones are preoccupied with sneaking out-of-bounds, thrashing each other, tearing each other's clothes off-or some combination of the three. Morgan Wilberforce, for one, can't take it any longer. Everything Wilberforce touches turns to disaster in his desperate attempts to fight off desire, boredom, and angst. He knocks himself unconscious tackling the unattainable Spaulding on the rugby pitch, his headmaster detests him for crimes committed years ago, and even his closest friends are subjecting him to physical tortures normally reserved for juniors. When an accident at the boarding school leaves him with more suffering than he could have fathomed, he finds himself alone and adrift. And the workaday charms of cricket practice, Victorian pornography, canings from classmates, and fumbling with the pub-keeper's daughter can only do so much to mend a broken...