Happy Pride month fellow bookish friends!! Although we’re #QueerAllYear here on the blog, June is the perfect opportunity to celebrate our LGBTQIA+ titles, which is exactly what we’re up to today — here are the fiction & poetry titles you NEED on your shelves this summer… let us know what LGBT+ titles you’re reading this month in the comments or tweet us @turnarounduk. Oh, and keep your eyes peeled for the non-fiction and graphic novel lists coming soon.
if you want to stock your bookshop shelves with anything on this list then please reach out to your local Turnaround sales rep! 💖
POETRY
Hated for the Gods
By Sean Patrick Mulroy
9781638340713 | Button Poetry | PB | 28/06/2023 | £16.99
An award-winning poet offers intricate and gracefully constructed poems of queer coming-of-age in the USA’s Deep South.
Sean Patrick Mulroy’s Hated for the Gods invites the reader to embrace their queer heritage with disarming tenderness, and urges them to celebrate the joy of gay sex without shame. Plaintive and joyous, sexy and ferocious — often all at once — Hated for the Gods is as much a call to action as it is a work of literature. Gorgeously rendered and skilfully constructed both to educate and inspire, Sean Patrick Mulroy’s poetry weaves together stories from his coming of age in the American South of the 1990s with the broader history of gay men in America. The result is a politically radical text that will leave you shocked with all you didn’t know about the history of queer people, and surprised by what you already knew but never could articulate.
Before Wisdom
By Paul Verlaine & translated by Keith Waldrop & K.A. Hays
9781954218123 | World Poetry Books | PB | 15/06/2023 | £18.99
A selection from the legendary French poet Paul Verlaine’s first four books translated with irreverence and musicality by Keith Waldrop and K.A. Hays.
Before he became an icon of fin-de-siècle French poetry and a major influence on the Symbolist and Decadent movements, before he met Arthur Rimbaud and published his best-known collection (Wisdom), and before he was renowned as a troubled and often violent alcoholic, Paul Verlaine wrote four books of poetry: this volume presents selections from those books, presenting Verlaine’s lesser-known early work, in translations that Cole Swensen has called ‘a real tour de force’ and Michael Palmer calls ‘remarkable versions.’
More Sure
By A. Light Zachary
9781551529172 | Arsenal Pulp Press | PB | 20/07/2023 | £16.99
A book of poems and augmentations, recording instances of love, self-realisation, and recovery in non-binary, queer, and autistic lives.
In their stunning debut collection, A. Light Zachary draws power from a vision of life — especially queer and neurodivergent life — as a journey of continuous self-realisation. These poems record the experience of locating oneself over and over again, within gender, language, family, labour, sexuality, fear, and love. Reaching back to claim queer space in the oldest Western canon, Zachary interrupts famous quotations from ancient Greek and Roman thinkers, asking: what advice might Juvenal or Seneca have handed down to non-binary citizens? Elsewhere, in concise and fluid verses that draw from punk rock and quantum physics, they ground the work firmly in the present. Come: invade the alien. Evade with the coyote. These poems propose a certain supremacy; in these unending journeys of discovery and alienation, ‘we become more sure of who we are than you.’
FICTION
I Can Be Me!
By Leslea Newman & Maya Christina Gonzalez
9781643792057 | Lee & Low | HB | 01/06/2023 | £18.99
From bestselling author Leslea Newman – a joyful picture book celebration of individuality, uniqueness, and children’s freedom to express themselves while engaging in whatever kinds of play they choose.
In this lighthearted story, a group of six, colorfully clad children exuberantly explore – through play – the many ways they can be themselves. They are free to embrace all kinds of activities, reveling in the fun of trying new things and discovering new ways of being. They can shoot baskets, dance around a room, weave ribbons through their hair, swim like a mermaid, and more. There is no right way or wrong way. There are no binary expectations. Children explore their individuality through whatever kinds of play appeal to them. With lively, gender-neutral rhyming verses and fun, gender-bending images, author Leslea Newman and illustrator Maya Christina Gonzalez invite young readers into a space where creativity and acceptance are enjoyed by all, and where each child will be inspired to say, ‘I can be… me!’
Meanwhile, Elsewhere
Edited by Cat Fitzpatrick & Casey Plett
9781736716809 | LittlePuss Press | PB | 11/06/2021 | £25
Now back in print, this ALA Stonewall Book Award- and Barbara Lettings Literature Prize-winning anthology is a wondrous and touching collection of sci-fi and fantasy from transgender writers.
A new part of the Turnaround family, LittlePuss Press — run by literary icons Casey Plett and Cat Fitzpatrick — are a brilliant press dedicated to Trans storytelling. The first title of their catalogue with us is Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy From Transgender Writers. What is it? It is the #1 post-reality generation device approved for home use. It will prepare you to travel from multiverse to multiverse. No experience is required! Choose from twenty-five pre-set post-realities! Rejoice at obstacles unquestionably bested and conflicts efficiently resolved. Bring denouement to your drama with THE FOOLPROOF AUGMENTATION DEVICE FOR OUR CONTEMPORARY UTOPIA.
Tell the Rest
By Lucy Jane Bledsoe
9781636140797 | Akashic Books | HB | 18/05/2023 | £20.99
Two estranged childhood friends find themselves on parallel paths to return to the site of the conversion therapy camp that tore them apart.
Delia Barnes and Ernest Wrangham met as teens at Celebration Camp, a church-supported conversion therapy programme — the dubious, unscientific, Christian practice meant to change a person’s sexuality. After witnessing a devastating tragedy, they escaped in the night, only to take separate roads to their distant homes. Years later, they both find themselves crossing paths again. Ernest, now a renowned poet, is now trying to write about their escape, but the memory remains stubbornly out of reach. Could this crossing of paths provide everything they need to come to terms with the history, violence, loss, and ultimately love, that they experienced together?
A Safe Girl to Love
By Casey Plett
9781551529134 | Arsenal Pulp Press | PB | 15/06/2023 | £17.99
A new edition of the acclaimed debut story collection by two-time Lambda Literary Award winner Casey Plett.
By the author of Little Fish and A Dream of a Woman: eleven unique short stories featuring young trans women stumbling through loss, sex, harassment, and love in settings ranging from a rural Mennonite town to a hipster gay bar in Brooklyn. These stories, shiny with whiskey and prairie sunsets, rattling subways and neglected cats, show that growing up as a trans girl can be charming, funny, frustrating, or sad, but will never be predictable. A Safe Girl to Love, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for transgender fiction, was first published in 2014. Now back in print after a long absence, this new edition includes an afterword by the author.
Tremendous Things
By Susin Nielsen
9780735271227 | Tundra | PB | 18/05/2023 | £9.99
A funny and heartfelt story about learning how to rise above your most embarrassing moment with humour, best friends and a killer triangle solo.
We all have moments that define us. For the comically clueless Wilbur, his moment happened on the first day of middle school, when someone shared his private letter with the entire student body, revealing some of his innermost thoughts. Now it’s the start of year nine, and Wilber is still running from the humiliation. Charlie, a tall, chic young woman who plays the ukulele and burps with abandon, captures his heart. Determined to rebuild Wilbur’s shattered confidence, his friends initiate a Queer Eye-style intervention to get his self-esteem back and help him impress Charlie in time for their exchange trip to Paris!
That Summer Feeling
By Bridget Morrissey
9780593549247 | Berkley — US | PB | 30/05/2023 | £16.99
Turns out you’re never too old for a summer camp romance. Or a change of heart.
Garland Moore used to believe in magic, the power of optimism, and signs from the universe. Then her husband surprised her with divorce papers over Valentine’s Day dinner. When new friends invite her to spend a week at their reopened sleepaway camp, she and her sister decide it’s an opportunity to enjoy the kind of summer getaway they never had as kids. No matter how she tries to run, the universe appears determined to bring love back into Garland’s life. She even ends up rooming with Mason’s sister Stevie, a vibrant former park ranger who is as charming as she is competitive. The more time Garland spends with Stevie, the more the signs confuse her. The stars are aligning in a way Garland never could have predicted.
Fragments Of A Woman
By Emma Venables
9781916398665 | Aderyn Press | PB | 01/06/2023 | £8.99
Five women, trapped by duty, fighting to survive.
National Socialist Berlin, and as their world changes around them, five women — Ingrid, Liesel, Greta, Gisela, and Lore — battle to hold on to their identities and their lives as they know them. Ingrid tries to save her daughter from her husband’s zealous beliefs. Liesel, a lesbian, marries a gay man for his, and her own, protection. Greta, spurned by Liesel, joins the Resistance then disappears. Gisela finds herself incarcerated in Ravensbruck, a women’s concentration camp, and then working in the camp brothel at Mauthausen. And Lore craves a life beyond Berlin, beyond wifedom and motherhood — a desire which leads her down a dark path. Exploring themes of motherhood, identity, trauma, war, fascism, and survival, Fragments of a Woman offers a nuanced and heart-breaking exploration of what it meant to be a woman under National Socialist rule.
My Mother Says
By Stine Pilgaard & translated by Hunter Simpson
9781912987528 | World Editions | PB | 08/06/2023 | £13.99
When good advice is all you need.
The narrator’s long-term girlfriend has just broken things off, forcing her to move back in with her father, a Pink Floyd-loving priest. While she desperately tries to convince her girlfriend to reconsider, the rest of the world bombards her with advice: from her childhood friend Mulle to her kindly therapist to her overbearing mother and card-playing father. Bumbling through the fog of disillusionment, the narrator gives herself permission to grieve, philosophize, and be generally outrageous until at last she sees a light at the end of the tunnel. Hilariously funny, My Mother Says is a compendium of conversations between people who talk past one another in a universe of misplaced good intentions.
The False Sister
By Briar Ripley Page
9781999671372 | Knight Errant Press | PB | 15/06/2023 | £10
‘Imagine if Shirley Jackson was a little imp who lived in a hole in a tree.’ — Gretchen Felker-Martin
It’s 1994, and Jesse Greer’s troubled older sister, Crys, has run away from home. Shy, socially awkward Jesse assumes that she has returned to her old haunts in the big city — until he discovers Crys’ remains in the woods behind his family’s house. Traumatised, Jesse runs to his parents for help, only to find that Crys has returned home, alive.
Jobs for Girls with Artistic Flair
By June Gervais
9780593298817 | Penguin Books (USA) | PB | 20/06/2023 | £16.99
An uplifting, feminist coming-of-age love story about a young woman who dreams of becoming a tattoo artist, and living life on her own terms.
Introvert Gina Mulley is determined to become a tattoo artist, and to find somewhere she belongs in her conventional Long Island town. But this is 1985, when tattooing is still a gritty, male-dominated fringe culture, and Gina’s funky flash is not exactly mainstream tattoo fare. The good news is that her older brother Dominic owns a tattoo shop, and he reluctantly agrees to train her. Gina has a year to prove herself, but her world is turned upside down when a mysterious psychic and his striking assistant, Anna, arrive on the scene. The tattoo shop is rocked by a crisis just as Gina finds herself falling in love with Anna. Dominic gives Gina an ultimatum, and she’s faced with an impossible choice: Is the romance and newfound independence she’s found worth sacrificing her dreams? Or can she find a way to have it all?
Bodies of Light
By Jennifer Down
9781925773590 | Text Publishing Company | PB | 22/06/2023 | £11.99
Winner of the 2022 Miles Franklin literary award.
A quiet, small-town existence. An unexpected Facebook message, jolting her back to the past. A history she’s reluctant to revisit: dark memories and unspoken trauma, warning knocks on bedroom walls, unfathomable loss. She became a new person a long time ago. What happens when buried stories are dragged into the light? This epic novel from the two-time Sydney Morning Herald Young Novelist of the Year is a masterwork of tragedy and heartbreak the story of a life in full. Sublimely wrought in devastating detail, Bodies of Light confirms Jennifer Down as one of the writers defining her generation.
Lákíríboto
By Ayodele Olofintuade
9781739220709 | Cipher Press | PB | 22/06/2023 | £10.99
A twisty thriller about the fate of a sprawling family in Lagos, Lákíríboto is a queer, feminist revenge thriller like no other, in which murder, betrayal, and witchcraft collide — with explosive results.
A twisty thriller about the fate of a sprawling family in Lagos, Lákíríboto is a queer, feminist revenge thriller like no other, in which murder, betrayal, and witchcraft collide — with explosive results. When her grandmother dies in the night, Moremi’s fate falls to her uncle, the grasping family chief who sends her off to work as a housemaid in Lagos. On arriving there, Moremi finds that the big city is not all she thought it would be. But she’s not alone. After another family death, Kudirat, accused of bringing misfortune to her close family, has also been sent to live as a maid in the same house, scrubbing floors and folding laundry for long-suffering Tola, whose abusive doctor husband refuses to treat. Together, with the help of her queer aunt Morieba, the four women must wrestle back control of their lives as the patriarchal traditions that govern the family push back against their freedoms.
Old Enough
By Hayley Jakobson
9780593473009 | Dutton | HB | 22/6/2023 | £24.99
A debut novel about a young bisexual woman who is pulled between the new life she’s creating for herself and the life she worked so hard to escape.
Savannah Henry is almost the person she wants to be, or at least she’s getting closer. She’s finally come out as bisexual, is making friends with the other queers in her dorm, and has just about recovered from her disastrous first queer ‘situationship.’ She is cautiously optimistic that her life is about to begin. But when she learns that her best friend from childhood, Izzie, has gotten engaged, Savannah’s life is sent into a tailspin. To make things more complicated? Savannah is definitely in love with her classmate Wes — sweet, long-eyelashed, funny Wes and their green backpack — something her college friends Candace and Vera take great pleasure in teasing her about. With a singularly funny, heartfelt voice, Old Enough explores queer love, community, and what it means to be a survivor.
Sunburn
By Chloe Michelle Howarth
9780857308412 | Verve Books | PB | 22/06/2023 | £9.99
Sunburn is an astute and tender portrayal of first love, adolescent anxiety and the realities of growing up in a small town where tradition holds people tightly in its grasp.
It’s the early 1990s, and in the Irish village of Crossmore, Lucy feels out of place. Despite her fierce friendships, she’s always felt this way, and the conventional path of marriage and motherhood doesn’t appeal to her at all. Not even with handsome and doting Martin, her closest childhood friend. Lucy begins to make sense of herself during a long hot summer, when a spark with her school friend Susannah escalates to an all-consuming infatuation, and, very quickly, to a desperate and devastating love. Fearful of rejection from her small and conservative community, Lucy begins living a double life, hiding the most honest parts of herself in stolen moments with Susannah. But with the end of school and the opportunity to leave Crossmore looming, Lucy must choose between two places, two people and two futures, each as terrifying as the other. Neither will be easy, but only one will offer her happiness.
After Sappho
by Selby Wynn Schwartz
9781913111397 | Galley Beggar Press | PB | 05/07/2023 | £9.99
The new paperback edition of the Booker shortlisted, Independent, Guardian, New Statesman, and BBC Book of the Year!
It’s 1895. Amid laundry and bruises, Rina Pierangeli Faccio gives birth to the child of the man who raped her – and who she has also been forced to marry. Unbroken, she determines to change her name; and her life, alongside it.
1902. Romaine Brooks sails for Capri. She has barely enough money for the ferry, nothing for lunch; her paintbrushes are bald and clotted… But she is sure she can sell a painting – and is fervent in her belief that the island is detached from all fates she has previously suffered. …
In 1923, Virginia Woolf writes: I want to make life fuller – and fuller.
Sarah Bernhardt – Colette – Eleanora Duse – Lina Poletti… these are just a few of the women sharing the pages of a novel as fierce as it is luminous. Lush and poetic; furious and funny; in After Sappho, Selby Wynn Schwartz has created a novel that celebrates the women and trailblazers of the past – their constant efforts to push against the boundaries of what it means, and can mean, to be a woman – that also offers hope for our present, and our futures.
The Love of Singular Men
By Victor Heringer & translated by James Young
9781908670779 | Peirene Press | PB | 11/07/2023 | £12.99
The life of a Brazilian boy living with monoparesis is suddenly thrown into chaos by his father’s misdeeds.
Camilo is a middle-class boy growing up in the sweltering suburbs of 1970s Rio de Janeiro, during Brazil’s often brutal military dictatorship. Disabled by monoparesis, he lives a sheltered life under the blistering sun, rarely venturing beyond his own back garden. But his predictable existence is interrupted when his father, a doctor complicit in the torture of political prisoners, brings home an orphan, Cosme, to live with the family. Who is this boy? What is he doing here? Camilo instinctively hates him but this hate soon turns to love, before, in an echo of the violence and intolerance of the society around them, their happiness is tragically cut short. Narrated by the older Camilo, living alone in his childhood neighbourhood and haunted by his past, this short yet hugely ambitious novel by Jabuti Prize-winning author Victor Heringer (1988-2018) is marked by a dazzling linguistic inventiveness that brings everything from the smells of the Rio streets to the heat of the boys’ skin.
Any Other City
By Hazel Jane Plante
9781551529110 | Arsenal Pulp Press | PB | 20/07/2023 | £18.99
The fictional memoir of a trans indie rock musician by the author of 2019’s mesmerising Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian).
Any Other City is a two-sided fictional memoir by Tracy St. Cyr, who helms the beloved indie rock band Static Saints. Side A is a snapshot of her life from 1993, when Tracy arrives in a labyrinthine city as a fledgling artist and unexpectedly falls in with a clutch of trans women, including the iconoclastic visual artist Sadie Tang. Side B finds Tracy, now a semi-famous musician, in the same strange city in 2019, healing from a traumatic event through songwriting, queer kinship, and sexual pleasure. While writing her memoir, Tracy perceives how the past reverberates into the present, how a body is a time machine, how there’s power in refusing to dust the past with powdered sugar, and how seedlings begin to slowly grow in empty spaces after things have been broken open.
Truth & Dare
By So Mayer
9781739784980 | Cipher Press | PB | 20/07/2023 | £10.99
The debut fiction collection from an inimitable critic, Truth & Dare is a deeply personal and fantastical ride through gender, trauma, queerness, science, history, and religion.
Cornish mermaids take to the football pitch to protest warming seas. Trans students in Manchester searching for the perfect dick accidentally warp the fabric of spacetime. England’s worst pogrom comes for York’s particle collider, powered by bread and gender energy. On Bournemouth beach, a storm delivers an ancestor across oceans of time to sire a drowning descendant. The devil stands a drink at London’s famous gay pub, The Black Cap, while Artemis, in the guise of Joan of Arc, roams a life-or-death night in East Sussex. Remember the Witchcraft Act of 1927, and the refugees that fled via cinema to defend the Republic of Catalunya? Of course not, it’s been written out of history. This is England, (but not?) as we know it. A queer quantum tour through what was, what is, what could have been and may yet still come to pass, in a collection that braids high-wire believe-it-or-not memoir with cutting-edge science fiction (or is it?) from alternate timelines that vibrate very close to ours.
A Tight Squeeze
By laura q.
9781648412912 | Microcosm Publishing | PB | 24/07/2023 | £9.99
A Tight Squeeze showcases the hot sex magick of queer t4t connection.
Balancing the weird, fun, and exciting with the vulnerable and bewildering, laura q explores the complex and sometimes painful realities of transfem identity, desire, and erotic experiences. Share in the intimacy of two genderqueer lovers’ tender first time together, witness the ultimate spell cast by a fiery mathemagician, and journey with the first trans astronaut toward a whole new kind of first contact. From after-hours surprises that lurk within the closets of a Swedish furniture store to the hustle of navigating life and love in post-condopocalypse Toronto, the queer women, enbies, and bois featured in these twelve tantalizing tales serve up a tender erotic banquet sometimes with a side of consensual violence, and always finished with a sweet course of connection and community.
Sacrificio
By Ernesto Mestre-Reed
9781641294850 | Soho Press | PB | 15/08/2023 | £14.99
Set in Cuba in 1998, Sacrificio is a triumphant and mesmeric work of violence, loss, and identity, following a group of young HIV-positive counterrevolutionaries who seek to overthrow the Castro government.
Cuba, 1998: Rafa, an Afro-Cuban orphan, moves to Havana with nothing to his name and falls into a job at a cafe. He is soon drawn into a web of ever-shifting entanglements with his boss’s son, the charismatic Renato, leader of the counterrevolutionary group ‘Los Injected Ones,’ which is planning a violent overthrow of the Castro government during Pope John Paul II’s upcoming visit. When Renato goes missing, Rafa’s search for his friend takes him through various haunts in Havana: from an AIDS sanatorium, to the guest rooms of tourist hotels, to the outskirts of the capital, where he enters a phantasmagorical slum cobbled together from the city’s detritus by Los Injected Ones. A novel of cascading prose that captures a nation in slow collapse, Sacrificio is a visionary work, capturing the fury, passion, fatalism, and grim humour of young lives lived at the margins of a society they desperately wish to change.
Andrion*
By Alex Penland
9781999671389 | Knight Errant Press | PB | 17/08/2023 | £10
A tale of steampunk antiquity on the brink of a feminist revolution.
When 16-year-old Kallis goes to see Aristophanes’ latest play, she’s inspired to sneak into the Assembly and try to make her name as an orator. It’s not legal, of course. Even if she had been born a man, she is too young. After overthrowing Athens and changing the course of the city’s future, her father raised her at his side. Even though the men around him treat her like a wild animal, Niko’s always been proud of her outspoken intelligence. Kallis has no reason to suspect he’ll be anything but supportive. She’s spent her whole life immersed in politics. Is it so unthinkable that she wants to follow in her father’s footsteps?
*Please note that cover is a placeholder image
Fayne
By Ann-Marie MacDonald
9781915290090 | Tramp Press | PB | 17/08/2023 | £15.99
‘I do not wish to be a woman.’
‘My dear. I’m afraid we none of us has the choice.’
‘I do not wish to be a lady, then.’
‘I cannot blame you.’
Fayne, a vast moated castle, lies to the misty southern border of Scotland, ruled by the Lord Henry Bell, Seventeenth Baron of the DC de Fayne, Peer of Her Majesty’s Realm of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. In Fayne we meet a trans character coming to terms with frustratingly arbitrary dichotomies in the world. The mysterious Lord Bell keeps to his rooms by day, appearing briefly at night to dote over his beloved and peculiarly gifted child. But even with all her gifts — intelligence, wit and strength of character — can Charlotte overcome the violently strict boundaries of contemporary society and establish her own place in the world?
The Body in the Back Garden
By Mark Waddell
9781639104406 | Crooked Lane Books | HB | 22/08/2023 | £28.99
In this queer cosy series debut, Luke Tremblay is about to discover that Crescent Cove has more than its fair share of secrets and some might be deadlier than others.
Crescent Cove, a small hamlet on Vancouver Island, is the last place out-of-work investigative journalist Luke Tremblay ever wanted to see again. He used to spend summers here, until his family learned that he was gay and rejected him. Now, following his aunt’s sudden death, he’s inherited her entire estate, including her seaside cottage and the antiques shop she ran for forty years in Crescent Cove. Luke plans to sell everything and head back to Toronto as soon as he can but Crescent Cove isn’t done with him just yet. When a stranger starts making wild claims about Luke’s aunt, Luke sends him packing. The next morning, though, Luke discovers that the stranger has returned, and now he’s lying dead in the back garden, if he wants to prove his innocence and leave this town once and for all, Luke will have to use all his skills as a journalist to investigate the colourful locals while coming to terms with his own painful past.
Magic, Lies, and Deadly Pies
By Misha Popp
9781639104475 | Crooked Lane Books | PB | 22/08/2023 | £18.99
Daisy Ellery’s pies have a secret ingredient: the magical ability to avenge women done wrong by men.
The first time Daisy Ellery killed a man with a pie, it was an accident. Now, it’s her calling. Daisy bakes sweet vengeance into her pastries, which she and her dog Zoe deliver to the men who’ve done dirty deeds to the town’s women. Daisy is informed by Frank, the crusty diner owner, that someone’s been prowling around her mobile baking van — and not just to inhale the delectable aroma. Soon enough, she finds a letter on her door, threatening to reveal her unsavoury secret sideline of pie a la murder. The upcoming statewide pie contest could be Daisy’s big chance to help wronged women everywhere… if she doesn’t meet a sticky end first. Because Daisy knows the blackmailer won’t stop until her business is in crumbles.
Monster Lovin’
By S. Park
9781648411519 | Microcosm Publishing | PB | 22/08/2023 | £9.99
Have you ever considered the erotic possibilities of loving an ancient being of impossibly inhuman power?
The monstrous becomes familiar and profoundly pleasurable in S. Park’s new collection of m/m queer, consensual erotica. Tentacles find their way into every crevice, a sexy stranger turns out to be part plant, part man, and a powerful demon cuddles up in bed. In these tender, sweaty, high-heat stories, horror turns to delight, and the monster always turns out to be worthy of love… and sometimes the monster turns out to be you.
School Days
By Jonathan Galassi
9781635424126 | Other Press | PB | 22/08/2023 | £16.99
The new novel from the acclaimed poet and publisher asks fundamental questions about love and sex, friendship and rivalry, desire and power, and the age-old dance of benevolence and attraction between teacher and student.
Sam Brandt is a long-term denizen of Connecticut’s renowned Leverett School. As an English teacher he has dedicated his life to providing his students with the same challenges, encouragement, and sense of possibility that helped him and his friends become themselves here half a lifetime ago. Then Leverett’s headmaster asks Sam to help investigate a charge brought by one of his classmates that he was abused by a teacher. Sam is flooded with memories, above all of his overwhelming love for his friend Eddie and the support of his most inspiring mentor, Theodore Gibson. Sam’s search for the truth becomes a quest to get at the heart of Leverett, then and now. The school has changed enormously over the years, but at its core lie assumptions about privilege and responsibility untested for more than a century. And Sam’s assumptions about his own life are shaken, too, as he struggles to understand what really happened all those years ago.
