Brilliant,beautiful, mischievous; few men can match Bartlett for the breadth of his exploration of gay sensibility * Independent * Exquisite ... a moving and erotic love story * Observer * Stands head-and-shoulders above any British or American gay novel to have appeared in several years * Gay Times * A triumph both in its execution and in its intent * Sunday Times * A writer who can really change the way people think * Literary Review * Profoundly moving and enriching. Bartlett has achieved what is almost impossible: he has written a novel about successful, happy love * The Glasgow Herald * Sexual, elegiac, imaginative and powerfully written * Time Out * Tender, brutal, explicit, erotic and moving... a fictional debut of staggering assurance and ability * Gay Times * As good a novel as you are likely to read this year * Literary Review * An exuberant individualist... his style is a disconcerting mix of the plush and the confrontational, underpinned by indignation at society's treatment of homosexuals * The Times * Neil Bartlett has grabbed history by the collar and made bitter love to it... At the very moment gay existence is threatened by disease and a renewed puritanism, Bartlett has embraced what was alien and criminal or merely clinical and loved it into poignant life -- Edmund White An extraordinary book... reveals what it is like to be gay in a city that, for the most part, pretends you don't exist * i-D *