This is an extract from A Private Man by Stephanie Sy-Quia, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2026. Find out more about the book here, and get your copy here.
1953
A lesser square in Rome. The hour of the Angelus was near, when all the city’s bells would ring together, all at once and out of time.
Ambient city sounds: fountains, footsteps, pigeons, shut-ters clapping closed, the distant clatter of cutlery on marble cafe tabletops.
There is a church. Its tall doors are open. Inside: move-ment, many figures clad in black. A white figure approaches from the dark. It does not step into the light: a man, surplice pleating and re-pleating as he walks. He reaches up and shuts the doors.
Within. The sound of a match being struck: the lighting of the frankincense. The tiny crystals catching, the latching of the silver lid closing over them. The thurible begins to swing in its chains; the incense dispensing itself. A moment more of chiselled silence, then the organ starts up, hard and base. The creak of a pew. The singing begins: male voices, some kind of introitus. Row upon row of women in black, their backs. This is the left side of the church, where the women sit. Some of them are fanning themselves. (It is June.) Their shoes are polished many times, creased where bunions are, and sensible. Their ankles are crossed. Their hands are in their laps (some twisting their rings, a few with high solitaire diamonds sitting proud on their fingers), their faces under black lace veils. These are the mothers. They vary in age. All are somehow identifiably English. Some of them whisper. The mothers have been smiling at one another timidly, sometimes shaking hands. Some of them have dis-covered they have sons who know each other, recognizing surnames mentioned in letters home. Others have met neighbours who live in adjoining parishes – places locally famed for the priest holes in particularly tenacious nobles’ stately homes, or for churches where frescoes have lately been uncovered after centuries, protected in haste as the King’s troops marched north. These women are offering their (sometimes eldest, sometimes only) sons to the priesthood. These women met and recognized this kinship like the flicker of a pilot light.
Outside, the diegetic music mutes.
Back inside the church: Claire Fletcher seeks a reassuring glance from her husband, Edwin, across the aisle. He lifts two fingers to his lips in answer, and leaves them linger-ing there. Her husband: that kind, good man who had submitted to the font for the love of her. Those hands which had held the heads of her sons; which had knocked on her father’s house in the last year of their teens, when the roses were acraze over the grey stone of the door; which had pulled her to him all the best nights of her life, into that form of secret, sacred praise. He looked on in a state of well-meaning partial comprehension. The painted saints gazed back.
Then the organ music, elemental and sounding from some dark blood-deep, groaning above the door – parting now, letting in the light to hit the frankincensy dim – and in they come. They number about a hundred: men, young, chasubles rolled and pinned at the shoulders, wearing white robes with hems of bride-like lace, lining up before the altar. There is David, and the one who stands beside him, and all the others behind. Their hands are clasped before them now. The organ gives a strange sonorous whinge again. They process, fanning out at the top of the aisle. Their robes all differ slightly from one another.
Claire shifts subtly in her seat. She catches the eye of the mother next to her and smiles. The other mother smiles back. The seminarians prostrate themselves in rows.
(c) Stephanie Sy-Quia
Explore the full list of 2026 Orwell Prize finalists, and read further extracts from the books, here.