[rating=4]
150 pages • The Friday Project • May 22, 2014 [PB]
24 themed chapters, with 10 numbered paragraphs, and each paragraph with exactly 120 words, Charles Lambert’s With A Zero At Its Heart is searingly honest.

“One feels oneself in the safe hands of an honest artist and consummate storyteller.”

[rating=3]
224 pages • Paradise Press • February 26, 2014 [PB]
David Gee’s The Bexhill Missile Crisis is set at the start of Swinging ’60s, and looks at a crisis that explores how and why they started to swing.

“I do rather wonder if Gee is suggesting that sex and death somehow became inextricably linked in the 1960s as a result of the Crisis. It had certainly been so during the Second World War and there must have been a strong incentive to party like there was no tomorrow.”

[rating=3]
370 pages • Max Fincher • 30 December, 2012 [PB]

Tim Bennett-Goodman found Fincher’s gay historical thriller thoroughly entertaining – an emotionally and intellectually engaging read.

“Set amongst the metropolitan circle of artists, collectors and cognoscenti of the early-19th century, this novel is not only obviously well-researched but it is also complex, intriguing and ingenious.”

[rating=1]
UK: 30 min • Brown Eyed Boy & Kudos Film and Television for ITV • April 29 2013

Vicious, with Ian McKellen & Derek Jacobi: 1970s stereotypes abound in this ill-considered farce.

” Why are they now selling their principles (and their community) down the river with this offensive tosh?”

[rating=4]
224 pages • Serpent’s Tail • 11 April, 2013 [PB]

True Story, by Helen Humphreys is a a poetic lament for the dead and especially for a loved-one lost far too early.

“… my grief is not that orderly, or that disciplined. It lopes ahead, stops short. I am not really able to contain it, merely follow where it leads.”

[rating=4]
329 pages • Serpent’s Tail • 7 March, 2013 [PB]

Petite Mort, by Beatrice Hitchman is a book that is by turns sensitive and coarse, gentle and brutal, beguiling and horrifying.

“This secretive ménage à trois, conducted in the claustrophobic atmosphere of the Durand’s grand but isolated home in the Bois de Boulogne on the outskirts of Paris, becomes stifling and, ultimately, destructive.”

[rating=3]
248 pages • Wilkinson House • 1 December, 2012 [PB]

Two stories, a gay love story in 2011, and a straight love story in 1914. Yet what is it that connects the two?

“In one sense both stories are, to a greater or lesser degree, about forbidden love. The gay storyline in modern Tel Aviv is hardly transgressive in its context but, for the older man, Niv, it nonetheless brings about a mental collapse.”

[rating=4]
238 pages • Summertime Publishing • 15 December, 2011 [PB]

Perking The Pansies sees a forty-something gay couple move to Turkey and into the midst of Imperial minded ex-pats.

“By working their way round the map of the Mediterranean, Jack and Liam eventually settle on Turkey as being both affordable and, for a Muslim country at least, reasonably tolerant.”

[rating=4]
307 pages • Matador • September 09, 2012 [PB]

For a bleak book with a high death count, David Gee’s The Dropout is also also witty, clever, insightful and worldly-wise.

“David Gee’s tongue-in-cheek, if dark, social and sexual satire (a sort of cross between David Lodge and Tom Sharpe) leads us through a topsy-turvy world of sexual shenanigans and unconventional relationships.”

[rating=4]
368 pages • The Bodley Head • 1915 [HB]

With the renewed interest in Ford Madox Ford sparked by the BBC serialisation of Parade’s End, Tim Bennett-Goodman looks at The Good Soldier

“The story revolves around the relationship of two married couples, the American Dowells (John and Florence) and the English Ashburnhams (Edward and Leonora), who suck into their dark orbit various other doomed characters that they systematically destroy.”