Rick Kempster

Better to Have Loved Rick Kempster

From teenage angst and emotional turmoil to a passionate and erotically portrayed love affair, this novel revolves around the life and problems of a young man during late adolescence in the closing stages of the 1960s. Through complex and intriguing relationships, it follows his progress into an ill-founded marriage and a bitter-sweet conclusion. A story of intense but thwarted love, it deals with pain, violence and unwanted affection in careful detail. The main character is assailed with typical adolescent contradictions. Consumed with sexual curiosity and plain lust, he is frustrated by shyness, ineptitude and most damning in his own eyes; inexperience. Starting against a background of doubt and uncertainty that so often accompanies those first, hesitant steps beyond the safety of home life and school, it follows the hero as he leaves the nest for the mixed blessings of independence and insecurity through a slow and sometimes painful path towards some semblance of maturity.