The Young Desire It


The Young Desire It is a novel by Australian author Seaforth Mackenzie. It won the ALS Gold Medal for Best Novel in 1937.

Plot summary

The novel details a year in the life of its teenage protagonist Charles Fox. He has left his idyllic life on an isolated Western Australian farm for boarding school. There he suffers the bullying of his fellow students, uncomfortable advances from his schoolmaster and a difficult scholastic workload.

Reviews

  • Writing at the time of the book's original publication, a reviewer in Brisbane's Sunday Mail wrote: "Writing of rare fineness and delicacy immediately is apparent in this, the first novel of a young Australian...The Young Desire It defies brief description. With all the fine perceptions of the author, the novel is baffling, unsatisfying, vague, yet stamped with a certain genius that might, with more manageable material, produce a memorable work."
  • The novel was reprinted in 2013 as a part of the Text Publishing Text Classics series. Alex Cothren reviewed this edition for Transnational Literature: "These are the bare bones of a coming-of-age narrative, but from them Mackenzie fashions a wholly muscular, hot-blooded portrait of a young man; a psychological profile so precise that every shift in Charles' mood carries the tension of a thriller. It is amongst the best written in the genre, a true Australian classic whose power has not diminished over the generations."

Awards and nominations

Editions