The Glass Minstrel - Gay Historical Fiction

By Hayden Thorne

It's the Christmas season in mid-19th century Bavaria...

Oh, I can't do better than Hayden on this, so here's the author's synopsis:

Two fathers, Abelard Bauer and Andreas Schiff­fer, are brought together through the tragic deaths of their eldest sons. Bauer, a bril­liant toy­maker, fash­ions glass Christ­mas orna­ments and his lat­est cre­ation is a min­strel with a secret molded into its features.

When Schif­fer sees Bauer’s min­strel orna­ment in the toy shop, he real­izes that Bauer is strug­gling to keep his son’s mem­ory alive through his craft. At first he tries to fault him for this, but then rec­og­nizes that he, too, is seek­ing solace and heal­ing by read­ing his son’s diary, a jour­nal that reveals, in both painful as well as beau­ti­ful detail, the true nature of his rela­tion­ship with the artisan’s son.

Then there’s fifteen-year-old Jakob Diederich. The young man is bur­dened with his own secret; he devel­ops an obses­sion with a trav­el­ing Eng­lish­man who stays at the inn where Jakob works. The lives of all three men inter­sect dur­ing the hol­i­day as Schif­fer tries to focus on his fam­ily in the present, Bauer strug­gles to rec­on­cile his past, and Jakob copes with an uncer­tain future.

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