Boys and Girls Come Out to Play

‘Everyone who now remembers Nigel Dennis thinks that his first novel was Cards of Identity (1955). But in fact he had already written Boys and Girls Come Out to Play (1949)… what I recall liking so much about it was first the story of a young man’s emergence from the dark tunnel of his childhood, with the discovery that there are drugs to control the epilepsy that has kept him imprisoned, and then the account of his first glorious summer of freedom… in an unnamed but famously picturesque north European city… What caught my imagination was Dennis’s ability both to enjoy the brightness of this little arena of casual pleasure and to go with the waiters and skivvies into the backstage world of dark kitchens and hard labour that frames and sustains it.’ Michael Frayn, Guardian