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Mark Behr - Author of 'Smell of Apples' and 'Embrace' [message #70896]

Fri, 22 January 2016 09:42

Ian John Copeland

Toe is in the water

Location: South East
Registered: December 2012
Messages: 33

Sadly Mark has died (at the tender age of 52), he wrote two schoolboy romance novels, Embrace is his masterwork but Smell of Apples, his first novel, is also well worth the read.

Mark's novels describe life growing up young and gay (or possibly bisexual) in South Africa in the dying days of the Apartheid regime, as someone who was born in Arusha Tanzania of mixed Irish-Afrikaans ancestry, Mark was conflicted in his loyalties, something that came to a head at Stellenbosch University where he ended up spying on his fellow students for the regime. That episode left him pondering his true identity, something that comes over in all his books.

In Embrace, Mark describes his affair with a school teacher and with a fellow pupil at the exclusive Drakkensberg Choir School. It was the school he went to as a boy, and a small school it is, with just 120 pupils, so to use the school, not re-identified was a brave move, especially since there are photos of him at the school. There is nothing to say that what he wrote was all fiction, but it is certainly intriguing!

I have written a little bit about him on my blog (see link below), do pop in and take a look, I have put Mark in with other authors like Edmund Marlowe, Henry de Monthelant and Roger Peyrefitte all authors of the schoolboy romance genre.

Ian

[Updated on: Fri, 22 January 2016 09:46]

Visit my Blog: http://thepaintheagony.blogspot.co.uk/

		Mark Behr - Author of 'Smell of Apples' and 'Embrace' By: Ian John Copeland on Fri, 22 January 2016 09:42
		Re: Mark Behr - Author of 'Smell of Apples' and 'Embrace' By: timmy on Fri, 22 January 2016 10:22
		Re: Mark Behr - Author of 'Smell of Apples' and 'Embrace' By: Ian John Copeland on Sat, 23 January 2016 09:57
		Re: Mark Behr - Author of 'Smell of Apples' and 'Embrace' By: solsticeman on Sat, 23 January 2016 10:23
		Re: Mark Behr - Author of 'Smell of Apples' and 'Embrace' By: JaredDreamer on Sun, 24 January 2016 08:29

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