Edinburgh

First published 2001

Reception

  1. 2026
    The New Yorker

    Reviewed by Garth Greenwell, 6 October

About the book

Read the full description

“Fee, a Korean-American child growing up in Maine, inhabits a fantasy world of spirits and heroes. Gifted with a beautiful soprano voice, Fee sings in a professional boys’ choir. When the choir director acts out his pedophilic urges on the boys in the choir, Fee is unable to save himself, his first love, Peter, or his friends – complicit within a silence both inexplicable and growing as each boy succumbs to the molestation.

His friendship with Peter deteriorates under the pressures of this mutual silent shame, leaving a hole within him that he cannot fill.”

“The choir director is arrested and imprisoned for his crimes, but the damage he inflicted remains: Peter self-immolates, another shoots himself in the head. Fee wanders through college, loving men he won’t have sex with and having sex with men he doesn’t love, and attempts suicide himself. He survives, and, now an adult, moves with his lover Bridey back to Maine, taking a job teaching art at a private boarding school.

But when he meets a student named Warden – the choir director’s son who knows nothing of his father’s heinous crimes – Fee, lost in the way Warden resembles Peter, has no choice but to confront the demons and ghosts of his brutal past.”

Description from Open Library

About the author

Alexander Chee, born 1967, United States.

Catalogue record

Welcome Rain · 224 pages

Publisher
Welcome Rain
Pages
224
ISBN
978-1-56649-225-6 +5
Full recordClose
Publisher
Welcome Rain
Pages
224
ISBNs
  • 978-1-56649-225-6
  • 978-0-544-67187-4
  • 978-1-5266-0913-7
  • 978-0-312-30503-1
  • 978-1-5266-0914-4
  • 978-1-4177-0692-1
Author
Chee, Alexander, 1967–
Statement
Edinburgh / Alexander Chee.
Records
Open Library

Subjects

  • Adult child sexual abuse victims
  • Choirboys
  • Korean Americans
  • Gay youth
  • Ferro-Grumley Award for Gay Fiction Finalist
  • Maine