Dance On My Grave: Summer of 85
£5.90£8.50 (-31%)
Look out for ‘Summer of 85’, the movie based on Aidan Chambers’s 1982 novel Dance on My Grave by groundbreaking French director Francois Ozon.
‘The film is an opportunity to think about yourself, to think about your life, about your love, about your purpose… But mostly I just want people to enjoy this story as much as I did when I first discovered it.’ Francois Ozon, Director in AnOther.
Deftly captures the giddy thrill of first love but also hints that a gut-wrenching tragedy is coming. The result is an incredibly poignant film exploring how love and loss are often horribly intertwined. NME
A sweet, gay romance that gradually morphs into something more suspenseful and macabre – Daily Telegraph
Summer of ’85 is a very memorable and charming film about young love. It’s a film that will take you back to your first summer love. The Gay UK
Life in his seaside town is uneventful for Hal Robinson, nothing unusual, exciting or odd ever happens to him – until now that is. Until the summer of his 16th birthday when he reaches a crossroads of choices in life. He foolishly takes a friend’s boat for a day’s sailing, gets into difficulty and is rescued by Barry Gorman. Their ensuing relationship results in a tumultuous summer for Hal as he experiences the intense emotions of his first teenage love.
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Additional information
| Publisher | Penguin (3 Jun. 2021) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Paperback | 256 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 0241541387 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0241541388 |
| Reading age | 12 – 17 years |
| Dimensions | 12.9 x 1.5 x 19.8 cm |
by Tom Arden
I picked up this book when it first came out, started reading it idly – then couldn’t put it down. This is a teenage novel, or young adult novel, of considerable and unusual accomplishment. It’s also a gay novel, a comic novel, and an experimental novel, too. The story is about Hal Robinson, a sixteen-year old schoolboy, and his dramatic and obsessive love affair with the richer, handsomer, older Barry Gorman. On the first page, we learn that Barry is dead, and that Hal has been arrested for desecrating his grave. In the rest of the novel, we find out why.
Not the least of the novel’s attractions is the clever and flexible style in which it is written. Influenced by Kurt Vonnegut and other postmodern writers – with diagrams, cartoons, lists, diary entries, scraps of screenplays and a social worker’s reports interspersing Hal’s vivid, fast-moving first-person narrative – the book is the second in a sequence of similar novels by Chambers, also comprising Breaktime (1978), Now I Know (1987), The Toll Bridge (1992) and Postcards from No Man’s Land (1999). These are not a conventional series: each tells a different story about different characters, and not all the novels include gay themes; but all are experimental in technique and edgy in subject, intelligent books and about intelligent teenagers confronting the world. Aidan Chambers is the real thing. I wish I’d had books like these when I was younger.
by Sarah S
I first read this book in my teens, attracted to it as it was set in my hometown, but not expecting too much as it was outside of my usual reading remit as a snarling adolescent.
To my great surprise, I loved it, recommended it to all my friends, and kept my copy until it mysteriously went missing at uni. I was delighted to find it available on Kindle.
The narrator, Hal, is hugely engaging and articulate, and his progress through love, then grief, madness, and finally self- awareness and hope is still resonant today in my own life, and Mr Chambers is a storyteller of excellence. If you know of a sensitive teen who can appreciate a no-holds-barred, intelligent and comic read, you’ll find yourself extremely popular if you make them a gift of this book. I can’t stress enough how world-enlarging this well-crafted tale will be to them.
by Elle
I read this book in 1986 when I was 23 and it still remains my favourite ever almost 30 years later.
by C. Bigsby
Following the release of a French film based on the book I decided I wanted to read it. Very easy and interesting.
by 329092
This book is the best book I’ve ever read. I read it once when I was 15 or 16, the same age as the youngest of the main characters. And once now that im 20, two years older than the oldest main character. It is written in an way, where the timeline goes back and forward in time all the time. You start at the end of the story, then you read the middle of the book witch wold normally be the start, and then the end. You read through the eyes of Hal (the main character), but also through the eyes of his therapist and newspapers.
The book is about a two gay or bi boys, but the theme of the book is not “Im gay and therefore my live sucks” like many other books about gay men. Its just a love story between two guys.
Again, the best book I’ve ever read.
by Gerald Milch
I read this because it was the book eventually revealed as being at the centre of the Simon James Green excellent expose of the homophobic horrors of Section 28 in “Boy Like Me” and which was concealed under the misleading cover “Wildflowers of Great Britain”!
“Dance on my Grave” concerns the developing relationship between two gay teenagers in Southend-on-Sea and their sworn agreement that whichever of them outlives the other will dance on his grave – a somewhat odd arrangement in the circumstances, given the youth of the pair and the assumption that there will be an actual grave rather than a cremation. But this is set in 1985 in a rather more conservative time and one of the boys is keen to explore his sexuality with unfortunate and tragic consequences. It is easy to see why it was made into a film as some of the scenes are very easy to imagine visually.
by H J
Aidan Chambers makes you tie yourself into knots just thinking. He’s not a shy writer; he’ll plunge in, tackle anything. His writing falls under the ‘so-life-like-it’s-scary’ category; some of the emotions could have come directly from your secret heart.
Dance on my Grave is about homosexual love, but also about so many other things that it is a slice of life, with all its many strands. It is also funny, in a way that The Toll Bridge, Postcards From No man’s Land and Now I Know aren’t. I got the giggles for ages in some parts, and still laugh out loud when I think of them; the fight!!!!
But the way he writes is out of this world. His books are going to stay with me all my life.