HOT SUMMER READS

R E V I E W S B Y G R A E M E A I T K E N A N D H E N D R I Y U L I U S W I J AYA HOT SUMMER READS

Wondering what to read over the break? Here’s our summer picks, and the boys’ Best Of ’21 for your consideration.

BATH HAUS By PJ Vernon (Doubleday) With his long-term boyfriend is out of town, Oliver visits a sauna for some anonymous sex. Instead of sex, the handsome stranger he goes into a private room with almost strangles him. He escapes by gouging his attacker’s cheek with his locker key.

With his neck marked by violent bruises, Oliver finds himself caught in a web of lies as he tries to hide his infidelity from his partner. Meanwhile, his attacker has tracked Oliver’s partner down and is intent on terrorising him… This first-rate thriller is the perfect summer page-turner with almost every chapter delivering a new twist. – Graeme

ARISTOTLE AND DANTE DIVE INTO THE WATERS OF THE WORLD By Benjamin Alire Saenz (Simon & Schuster) In this sequel to the popular young adult novel, Aristotle And Dante Discover The Secrets Of The Universe, Dante and Ari are growing up gay during the devastating AIDS era in the 1980s. With support from their parents and friends, they declare their relationship and together face the world that cruelly challenges their existence.

Tender and compassionate, Saenz also pushes racial issues to the fore, making this resonate with contemporary times. – Hendri

AFTERPARTIES: STORIES By Anthony Veasna So (Grove Press) The tragic backstory to this captivating collection is that the author didn’t live to see it published. Anthony Veasna So died in December 2020 at the age of just 28. It’s rare to see fiction from a gay Cambodian-American writer and once upon a time this would have been dismissed as too niche, especially a book of short stories as opposed to a novel. So it’s gratifying that more diverse voices are being published and, what’s more, proving very successful.

Set in Central Valley, California, the stories illuminate the lives of immigrants and their children, shadowed by the country they have abandoned. Fans of Bryan Washington’s highly acclaimed collection Lot will find many similarities here. – Graeme

100 BOYFRIENDS By Brontez Purnell (MCD x FSG Originals) Witty, foulmouthed and feral, 100 Boyfriends chronicles fragments of sexual encounters between the narrator and other men. From lunch breaks, offices and online dating platforms to bars, Purnell reveals the dysfunctional sides of gay life while exploring the many possibilities we can carve out and make from our own f laws. – Hendri

PANDEMONIUM By Andrew Mcmillan (Jonathan Cape) Award-winning poet Andrew Macmillan traverses pain, suffering, trauma and depression. Raw yet tender, his new poems move from the sex and physicality that he explores in the previous collections, to living minds and hearts to figure out what redemption might mean for us. – Hendri

Selected by Graeme and Hendri

1. Baggage: Tales From A Fully Packed Life by Alan Cumming

Cumming is acclaimed as a versatile performer: theatre, film, television, cabaret. He is also a gifted writer. He strikes a thoroughly engaging and intimate tone. He’s witty, entertaining, insightful, unafraid to own up to his old faults and failings, and the celebrity gossip he dishes up is absolutely first rate!

There are many anecdotes about famous people such as Gore Vidal, Faye Dunaway, Liza Minnelli and director Bryan Singer, and often they are not particularly f lattering or filtered. When it comes to describing his ex-partners and relationships he’s more coy, usually not revealing their names.

The narrative is episodic and jumps around somewhat, but this is not distracting. What shines through is that this is a celebrity memoir which is authentic: Cumming wrote it himself as evidenced by the fact that he was four years late delivering the manuscript to his publisher.

2. Love In The Big City by Sang Young Park The English debut of this South Korean writer chronicles the coming-of-age of a gay man, Young, told through his relationship with Jaehee (his female best friend), his mother dying with cancer, and his boyfriend, Gyu-Ho.

After jumping from one man to another man on Tinder and dealing with his mother’s illness, Young falls in love with GyuHo, who is struggling to make a living in the city.

Young and Gyu-Ho share their life together and carve out their own space in the world until one day Gyu-Ho must leave. With tender memories of Gyu-Ho, Young pours recollections of Gyu-Ho into his writing. 3. Alec by William di Canzio An extremely wellexecuted sequel to EM Forster’s groundbreaking novel Maurice, but from the point of view of Alec Scudder, the gamekeeper servant. What an inspired idea and what an enormous pleasure it is to revisit these characters!

4. The Right To Sex by Amia Srinivasan In the era of #MeToo, this Oxford University scholar’s dazzling debut brings to the fore the difficult yet necessary conversations around consent, power relations, and sexual desires, pushing us to rethink our contemporary understanding of empowerment and liberation.

5. Home Stretch by Graham Norton This is TV personality Norton’s third novel but his first to place a gay man at the centre. The book’s great strengths are its pageturning plot, the strong characterisation, and the dead-on portrait of a small Irish village.

6. Matrix by Lauren Groff This instant New York Times best-seller takes us on the journey of 17-yearold Marie de France to an impoverished abbey in England. Together with the other sisters, Marie explores and invents what the future can mean for women in the 12th Century.

7. The Echo Chamber by John Boyne We could all do with a laugh after covid and here the humour is dialled up to absurd-but-entertaining new heights. Boyne’s target is social media and woke culture. 8. Let The Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 19871993 by Sarah Schulman This is a comprehensive history of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) in New York, told through activists’ stories and experiences. Rather than exploring the history chronologically, Schulman focuses on the highs and lows of ACT-UP activism, and the activists’ political and personal decisions in an ever-evolving situation.

9. Anything But Fine by Tobias Madden This heartwarming young adult novel from an Australian writer portrays an interracial relationship between a White man and an Asian man, and a father’s evolving acceptance of his gay son.

10. Snow by John Banville “The body is in the library.” The setting is Wexford, Ireland, 1957, and the stage is set for a classic whodunnit at the manor house of the aristocratic Osborne family. The local priest has not only been murdered but also castrated!

MORE: The Bookshop Darlinghurst specialises in LGBTQIA+ books. Tel: (02) 9331 1103. Email: info@thebookshop.com.au. Web: thebookshop.com.au. Visit: 207 Oxford Street, Sydney.