H. S. Cross

books are worlds

reading takes you inside

Novels

Wilberforce

England, 1926. At St. Stephen’s Academy, the students are on the verge of revolt. While the younger boys plot an insurrection, the older ones are preoccupied with sneaking out-of-bounds, thrashing each other, tearing each other’s clothes off—or some combination of the three. Morgan Wilberforce, for one, can’t take it any longer.
Wilberforce is an indelible portrait of a young man caught between lust and cruelty, grief and God, frustrated love and abject longing.

Grievous

Set in 1931 at St. Stephen’s Academy, a boys’ boarding school in Yorkshire, Grievous focuses on teacher John Grieves (nicknamed Grievous) and his student Gray Riding. Gray begins a secret correspondence with John’s 13-year-old goddaughter, Cordelia, while John is in love with her mother. The action—at the Academy and across England and the Continent—includes love, betrayal, illness, grief, Quakers, morphine, theater, and second chances.

Amanda

England, 1926.

Forthcoming October 2025 from Europe Editions.

“If you had told me, earlier this year, that I would be immersed in not one but two long novels set in an English boarding school, I would have scoffed. If you had told me that I would be looking forward to the author’s next book . . . I would have been incredulous. Such is the power of a writer like H. S. Cross.”

John Wilson, National Review

About

H. S. Cross

H. S. Cross was raised in Michigan and lived many years in New York City. She has taught grades 2-12, and many of her formative experiences involved being semi-lost in the countrysides of England, Ireland, and Scotland. She currently lives in Savannah on the Moon River.

photograph of H.S. Cross

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