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