Matt Cain’s The Secret Life of Albert Entwistle is a heartbreakingly sweet story about how times of crisis can trigger moments of rewarding growth. Melancholic and romantic, it charts one man’s realisation that it is never too late to live life to its fullest. Albert Entwistle is a postman in an English country village. A... Continue Reading →
TJ Klune wraps up his YA superhero trilogy, The Extraordinaries, with Heat Wave which sees teenager Nick launching into his superhero career, as well as launching into his fully-fledged relationship with Seth. Quick note: being the last part of a trilogy, there’s no way to avoid spoilers for the previous books in this review. Nick... Continue Reading →
If you’re looking for a cute, contemporary gay romance to snuggle up with then Kris Ripper’s Book Boyfriend is a good place to start. Behind it’s rom-com trappings, it has hidden depths and a beautifully flawed lead character in PK. Preston ‘PK’ Harrington is an editorial assistant (and wannabe author) working at a book publisher... Continue Reading →
Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City has had many lives. From serialized chapters in The San Francisco Chronicle, to a series of novels, TV and radio adaptations, and a stage musical by Jake Shears. Now it has been turned into a charming graphic novel by Isabelle Bauthian and Sandrine Revel, potentially the first of a... Continue Reading →
Chris McCrudden is slowly carving out his own niche in sci-fi with his space comedy Battlestar Suburbia series, and the third entry Sashay to the Centre of the Earth, brings the action down to Earth; way, way down into the Earth. In McCrudden’s universe the “war with the machines” was less Terminator-style and more about... Continue Reading →
Jon Ransom’s debut novel, The Whale Tattoo, is filled with prose that picks you up in its wake and takes you on a journey. Complex, fraught and violent, The Whale Tattoo reads like an early Tracy Lett’s play - a steaming mix of blue-collar rage and menace. Joe Gunner is working in a chip shop... Continue Reading →
For some people, life starts at 40. For miserable, corporate manager Wallace Price, life started when he died. Better late than never. TJ Klune’s new novel, Under the Whispering Door, takes his breezy fantasy stylings and tackles a love story beyond the grave. When Wallace attends his own sparsely attended funeral, he meets Mei—a reaper... Continue Reading →
“Everything is about sex. Except sex, which is about power”—the quote, apocryphally attributed to Oscar Wilde—sums up much of the machinations at the heart of Neil Blackmore’s brilliant The Dangerous Kingdom of Love, a thrilling retelling of the later years of Francis Bacon’s life with the seductive frisson of Choderlos de Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses... Continue Reading →
Cameron Maddock, who goes by Cam, isn’t just your average twenty-something gay tech guy in San Francisco avoiding his less-than-accepting family. He’s a cyber-security genius. But that doesn’t explain why an apparent alien assassin is pursuing him. Robert Roth’s Into the Lightning Gate is a fast-paced, pulpy sci-fi snack with a solid, high-concept base that... Continue Reading →
The gap between real support and performative allyship—the lurking fear that beneath the flag waving veneer of equality hides something untrustworthy, the thought that when push comes to shove straight people may not really have our backs—is the starting point for Matthew Clark Davison’s debut novel, Doubting Thomas. Thomas is an openly gay fourth grade... Continue Reading →
