Despite the attractions of this mirror world, and of Leapling, who is at home there, the narrator finishes university and takes off as quickly as possible for “acid-soaked Northern California” — a destination not so much chosen as accepted: “[A]s all butterflies abide by their predestined migrations, it was in my queer genes.

Their ensuing affair, with its violent, animal intensity and its intoxicating and toxic power play will initiate a dance of repulsion and attraction that will cross years, span continents, drag in countless victims - and culminate in terrible betrayal. I couldn’t bring myself to sit down and get to work on it though, for almost a decade, it felt vulgar and obscene,' the author tells Tatler. It's four in the morning, and our narrator is walking home from the club when they realise that it's February 29th – the birthday of the man who was something like their first love. Everything is momentary, a digital life is wiped out without any more ceremony than a physical life, it is simply so. Every single page is heavy with meaning and though the language is admittedly pretentious at times, it is in the best possible way.I hope this novel gets all the praise it is due, and I hope the members of Booker Prize selection committee are watching. there in the gallery, i think i finally began to understand that you and Adam really were just what you said you were, just two gay men, just two guys who have sex with guys, that’s all. It is, by the way, “very gay”, in terms of the graphic sex scenes and lens with which male bodies are displayed, talked about, and sexualized, with, you know, lots of sex. all gorgeously hedonistic and glittering cities and swirling snowstorms and swims in the sparkling blue ocean.

The romance was doomed, not least because Thomas, though charismatic, appears to have been a pretty toxic character. His relationship to his queerness and his fundamental homophobia and conservative values are unearthed, begging the question of who he might have become. Thank you to the publisher for providing me an advanced e-copy via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Many of the lifestyle descriptions reminded me how peacefully quiet - and very different my own life is. At Certain Points We Touch is a story of first love and last rites, conjured against a vivid backdrop of London, San Francisco and New York – a riotous, razor-sharp coming-of-age story that marks the arrival of an extraordinary new talent.There's way too much detail (and nasty at that) to the point you don't care about the story anymore. There, living rent-free above a laundromat with a couple of semi-employed Berkeley students, the narrator survives on gifted half-burritos and performance art, and finds a “golden-age drag mother” who encourages the trio’s performances and imbues them with the hopes and dreams of the Haight-Ashbury era.

And now this sounds really negative just because I can’t be arsed with toxic gay boys imbued with fictional glamour but … err … I actually really loved this. Rather than about transitioning or bildungsroman or capturing the “scene”, it really is almost 400 pages of showing how her life was affected by Thomas while acting as an architect with some perspective, cobbling together who he actually was. But he’s brought to life so three-dimensionally that — even as a reader who knows as well as the narrator does that it would be better to stay away from this “handsome bastard” — it’s hard not to see his deadpan appeal. There’s something too painful in remembering how full of potential everything seemed back then when the world was ours”.The narrator describes Leapling’s photography as “an experiment in seeing the world,” carried out with old cameras and even older film, such that the images might either come out beautifully or result in a series of completely black frames, streaked with red. And I think I must be getting old, or I’ve read that story too often, because my patience for it is not so much worn thin as entirely dissolved.