Foreword by Huw Lemmey
Introduction by Andrew Durbin
Afterword by Luke Roberts
Read an excerpt in Granta.
Love, Leda
Newly discovered in the author’s archives and published for the first time in the UK in 2023, this portrait of queer, working class London drifts from coffee shop to house party, in search of the next tryst.
Fiction
$16.95
Additional information
| Format | eBook, Paperback |
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Leda is lost. He spends his days steeped in ennui, watching the hours pass, waiting for the night to arrive. Trysts in the rubble of a bombsite follow hours spent in bed with near strangers, as Leda seeks out intimacy in unlikely places. Semi-homeless and estranged from his family of origin, he relies on the support of his chosen one: a community of older gay men and divorced women who feed and clothe him, gently encouraging him to find a foothold in a society which excludes him at every turn. And then there is Daniel, a buttoned-up man of the Lord, for whom Leda nurses an unrequited obsession—one which sends him spiraling into self-destruction. Pre-dating the British Sexual Offences Act of 1967, Love, Leda was first published in 2023 in the UK. This long lost novel is a portrait of London’s Soho that is now lost, an important document of queer working-class life from a voice long overlooked.
Praise
Acerbic yet wistful, indecent, caffeinated, raw, suddenly profound – a hip flask of a novel, brimful of phenomenal lines.
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Details
ISBN: 9781643622453
Paperback, 144 pages
Publication Date: September 24, 2024
Reviews
One can only wonder what effect Mark Hyatt’s only known novel, Love, Leda, would have had on British culture had it found a publisher and reached bookshop shelves when it was written, in the middle of the 1960s. A frank, intimate portrait of a young working-class homosexual struggling to find meaning, work or just a good fuck in London, living between friends’ sofas and dingy bedsits, Love, Leda is a book without contemporaries. It might well have been explosive and remembered as one of the great works of working-class literature of the time.
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