Cirrus@Austlit

'In My Lovely Frankie, the acclaimed YA writer Judith Clarke’s latest novel, Tom Rowland is 16 years old in the 1950s when he has a religious epiphany of sorts. He’s so struck that he defies the wishes of his loving but not terribly observant parents and enrols at St Finbar’s, a seminary on the coast. It’s hellish. Tom is lonely and homesick until he meets the boy in the cell next door, Frankie Maguire, who has been forced to the seminary after his fundamentalist parents catch him having sex (through no fault of his own). Tom falls for the tortured Frankie, causing a swirl of emotions around his relationship with God and Catholicism, his sexuality and his future as a priest.' (Introduction)