Within the pages of this address book you will find not only names and places, but lives?with their everyday griefs and joys, and their everyday braveries. A doctor revisits a formative sexual experience as he relocates in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. A dancing queen takes ownership of his life?and first flat?at the height of the AIDS epidemic. A photographer develops a defiant passion in a Victorian tenement. A civil partnership celebration lowers barriers in a high-rise housing development. A priest comes up against the Home Office. In the Sixties, an expectant mother comes to accept a queer neighbour. Fifty years later, a widower comes to terms with the loss of a life partner. Seven different times.
Seven different situations. Seven different characters, each seeking to feel at home?somewhere or with someone. Let Bartlett lead you surefootedly between lives and locations, through decades of change to find hope in the strangest of places.
'A cleverly structured, funny then deeply moving novel about connections, sympathy and the traces left by our lives and loves' - Patrick Gale
‘Neil Bartlett is an all-seeing wizard’?Edmund White
'Bartlett is a pioneer on and off the page and we are lucky to have him telling our stories.'?Damian Barr
Author
About Neil Bartlett
Born in 1958, Neil Bartlett has spent twenty-five years at the cutting edge of British gay culture. His ground-breaking study of Oscar Wilde, Who Was That Man? paved the way for a queer re-imagining of history ; his first novel, Ready To Catch Him Should He Fall, was voted Capital Gay Book of The Year; his second, Mr Clive and Mr Page, was nominated for the Whitbread Prize. Both have since been translated into five European languages. Listing him as one of the country's fifty most significant gay cultural figures, the Independent said "Brilliant,beautiful, mischievous; few men can match Bartlett for the breadth of his exploration of gay sensibility". He also works as a director, and in 2000 was awarded an OBE for services to the theatre.
