Cedilla picks up where Adam Mars-Jones’s previous novel Pilcrow (2008) left off.
Cedilla picks up where Adam Mars-Jones’s previous novel Pilcrow (2008) left off. That book described the early life of John Cromer, a boy whose joints are fused by arthritis. Most of it saw him bed-bound, whether at home in Bucks, at hospital, or boarding at a school for the disabled, where, sizing up the bulges in his classmates’ trousers, he wowed his dormitory with an unrivalled ability to talk filth after dark.
The new book gets out more. Over the course of the 1960s, John has corrective surgery (painfully botched), passes his driving test, flies to India for five weeks to learn about Hinduism (two unlikely milestones teasingly flagged in Pilcrow), sits A-levels at a mainstream grammar school and gets a place at Cambridge.
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