Address Book

Description

The new work of fiction by the Costa-shortlisted author of Skin Lane. ‘Address Book is peopled with lovers, battlers, adventurers and optimists. Neil Bartlett is a peerless chronicler of queer lives past and present.‘-NIVEN GOVINDEN 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. ‘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