‘Boulevard’ by Jim Grimsley

Don’t you just hate it when you find a book with a cover so awful that you very nearly don’t read it at all? This happened with ‘Boulevard’ – the copy I picked up in the library had a photo of a young man on the front that was so ‘blond brain-dead Eighties porno-flick twink’ [...]

‘Time and Place’ by Alan Sheridan

Okay, I’ll admit it – this book had me baffled. It was billed as a fictionalised biography based on the diaries of a real-life actor, Mark Sheridan, as written by his descendant Alan Sheridan, but I have to admit I couldn’t tell if this was the case, or if it was really just a novel [...]

‘Death of a Monk’ by Alon Hilu

Finding this book at all was something of a happy accident, since I’d never even heard of the author, let alone the title. This isn’t really surprising as Hilu is an Israeli writer and Death of a Monk was translated from Hebrew by an American scholar. Browsing the shelves of an Aladdin’s cave [...]

‘Better Angel’ by Forman Brown, writing as Richard Meeker

The use of a pen name is important in this book. It was published in the early 1930s when homosexuality was still a criminal offence, but the subject matter is a (clearly autobiographical) account of a young man ‘coming out’ and coming to terms with his own sexuality. The author was unable to use his [...]

‘The Facts of Life’ by Patrick Gale

I’m normally a big fan of Gale’s work.  His ‘Rough Music’ has made it onto my all-time favourite book list, so when I saw this book on the shelves of my local Oxfam bookshop, I grabbed it.  It’s a big thick volume, and tells the story of one family, through three generations of trials and [...]

‘Fool’s Errand’ by Louis Bayard

The first of the holiday reads…

Gorgeous, just gorgeous! This book is warm, funny, lively, involving and, er, did I mention gorgeous?
It tells the story of Patrick, a gay man living in Washington DC who falls asleep at a friend’s house and sees the man of his dreams. But has he dreamt ‘Scottie’ (so called because [...]

‘Dancer’ by Colum McCann

This is a fictionalised biography of Rudolf Nureyev. And wow. What a book! I’d give my right arm to be able to write like that. The narrative is experimental to say the least, with frequent changes in point of view from one of Nureyev’s friends, colleagues or relatives to another. Each time the point of [...]

‘Rough Music’ by Patrick Gale

It’s always very satisfying when you find a totally ‘new’ author you’d never even heard of before, read one of their books and love it, because it opens up a whole new world of books to grab from the library or buy. And at this point I’d like to say a big ‘thank you’ to [...]

‘From Blue to Black’ by Joel Lane

 
The title of this book is wonderfully appropriate, both in its suggestion of the book’s noir genre and in its reflection of the incredible monochromatic atmosphere Joel Lane conjures up.
Because there is almost no colour in his narrative. Everything described is either black, white or in endless shades of gray, with only the occasional explosion [...]

‘The Linguist’ by Sebastian Beaumont

This book sounded absolutely wonderful when I first picked it up off the library shelf. “A chilling story of the aftermath of a love triangle and the complexities of self discovery, therapy and reconciliation”, it beguilingly said. Or how about, “Howard, 32, a translator, interpreter and prostitute, fell in love with Corinne. Her husband Matthew [...]