Dooneen
A wounded man writes from a cliff-cut room as Dublin’s housing uprising ends in massacre and contested record.
Theme
Queer Life
Reviews of literary fiction about gay desire, partnership and the lived realities of queer identity and experience.
Reviews filed under this theme.
The Disappearers
A rehearsal room in 1988 Kingston becomes the site of an attack whose aftermath spreads through aliases, testimony, revenge and return.
Kingfisher
A debut novel follows a writer’s affair with an older woman, turning desire, illness and care into a question of who controls the record.
Palimpsest
A memoir organises a life as social evidence, placing wit, rank and sexual candour under the pressure of what the argument cannot contain: the grief that outlasts every performance of detachment.
She Who Remains
Measuring the cost of remaining alive when survival requires self-erasure.
The South
A failing farm in southern Malaysia. A queer attraction formed across unequal access to exit. The South asks who can leave, and at what cost.
While The World Slept
A Nigerian short story collection about queer life, family pressure, religious judgement and the cost of being known.
Box Hill
A six-year BDSM relationship written as a study of unequal access: a flat without a key, a man without a surname, a death without a grave.
I Make Envy on Your Disco
Nothing translates for Sam Singer in Berlin: not the signs, not the city, not what he cannot say to the man waiting in New York.
The Weight of Angels
Decades stolen from Oscar Wilde are returned, but their moral cost is laid bare.
The Summer Boy
A summer built on movement and ease continues after a disappearance, leaving the narrator fixed on a gap that cannot be explained.
The Unnameable
A relationship forms between two teenagers but cannot survive visibility. Masculinity is enforced through exposure and naming, shaping queer life as concealment.