Twenty Years Together - Tom Rob Smith
A novel about a long-term gay partnership shaped by emotional safety and narrative order.
Kindle - Simon & Schuster, April 2026
Against Safety as Depth
Twenty Years Together treats longevity as moral achievement. Endurance signals virtue. Emotional fluency signals growth. Love, once fully articulated, settles into something stable and good.
That belief governs the novel. It is also where it fails.
The book attends closely to routine and shared life. It recognises the lack of public scripts for long-term gay relationships and frames marriage as recognition and repair. This will reassure many readers. For me, it felt airless.
Conflict appears only to be processed. Infidelity occurs, is discussed, and leaves no trace. Sex exists without heat. Desire behaves. Nothing corrodes character. Nothing fractures the relationship beyond what can be named, contextualised, and smoothed away. Emotional disturbance is treated as a problem to be solved rather than a force that alters behaviour.
The prose reinforces this flattening. Images arrive already explained. Dialogue sounds coached. Characters speak as though they have already processed the moment they are living through. Silence has no function. Confusion passes quickly. Pain exists only to be folded back into balance.
Character development remains thin across the novel. Danny begins self-aware and stays there. His unease is catalogued rather than transformed. Luis carries heavier material: faith, repression, class tension, volatility. Yet it remains sealed off as background. It never exerts pressure on the present. It explains rather than disrupts.
The supporting cast is weaker still. Friends and colleagues exist to deliver insight or affirmation. They stabilise the central couple rather than complicate it. No one misjudges for long. No one introduces lasting friction. The world functions as a support system for the relationship, not a testing ground.
What makes this dispiriting is how closely the book follows the safest template of heterosexual marriage fiction. Difficulty proves commitment. Communication guarantees survival. Marriage resolves the anxiety it raises. Even straight literary novels tend to allow mess, resentment, and compromise to linger. Here, queerness is translated into acceptability rather than examined on its own terms.
This is not a novel interested in intimacy as risk or love as something that might cost you. It wants to demonstrate that gay relationships can be responsible, stable, and emotionally correct.
That may comfort some readers. It left me cold.
At a certain point, safety stops functioning as insight.
Rating: ★★☆☆☆
Advance reading copy provided by NetGalley.