The Prelude By Alan Halliday

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The Prelude

Alan Halliday

At Oxford University in the early 1970s, James D'Arblay was a talented and good-looking young man with a reputation for unreliability. A compulsive actor and musician and a man of considerable physical charm, D'Arblay is drawn towards the romantic life and the flamboyant poetry of Lord Byron during the years the poet spent in Venice from 1816 to 1819.

Transferring his graduate research studies from cold and foggy Oxford to the glittering light of Venice, James D'Arblay soon begins to think he is Lord Byron, and embarks on a series of passionate affairs with three of the wealthiest young women in Venice – Flora, Lara and Ginevra – with disastrous consequences, while his friend from Oxford, the devoted Hobhouse, picks up the pieces."

About Author

Alan Halliday, author

Alan Halliday

Alan Halliday trained at the Courtauld Institute of Art and was awarded a DPhil from Oxford University in 1982. Since then, he has been a full-time artist, specialising in paintings of performers and performances. His first novels, Tante Brutus and Letting Go were published by Vanguard Press in 2024. Whistler at Hall i’ th’ Wood: 1899 – a Ghost Story is the first of three related novels, known as The Sylvian Sugar Trilogy, and also includes Proust in London: 1900 and The Sitwells in Paris: 1916. Alan Halliday lives and works in France as an artist and writer with a great interest in film.

 

Alan Halliday, author