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. The copyright to all contents of this site is held either by Granta or by the individual authors, and none of the material may be used elsewhere without written permission. But too many people and the neon lights cause useless thoughts and unconscious problems in endless negative patterns and I am a slave to this sick nonsense so say to myself: ‘Sit down, jump up or go for a run. Trysts in the rubble of a bombsite follow hours spent in bedsits with near strangers, as Leda is forced to find intimacy in unusual places. One man’s restless, meandering journey through the lonely streets of 1960s London, replete with existential longing, visceral desire and unrequited love.

I can see my white socks, just below grubby knees, with their rhythmic pattern of holes ascending like the bubbles in lemonade.Leda’s sexual encounters tend to be triggered by a wink in a bar, a not-so-casual glance in a public lavatory. Predating the decriminalisation of gay sex in 1967 and never before published, Love, Leda by Mark Hyatt is a lost gem of urban gay literature.

This newly discovered, never-before-published novel – which pre-dates the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 – is a portrait of a lost Soho, as well as an important document of queer, working-class life, from a voice long overlooked. That means that with every subscription, we are supporting people in poverty to get back on their own two feet. I hand him a ten-shilling note, he knocks and the door opens, but it’s on a chain and one can see a man, two inches wide and five feet tall.The antidote to Leda’s dreary, sometimes chilling travels, which all seem to be directed at running into his unrequited love, is Hyatt’s sobering sense of reality: while it is not a feel-good story, it is a frank, if somewhat stark, exploration of the prejudices and challenges faced by gay men in the 60s and how, even in the midst of that, there are covert delights as Leda moves through London with the deft movements of a secret agent, undercover but in plain sight. redis What comes across is the futility of city life in post war London when being gay must have been so confusing.

The long-awaited second instalment in Samantha Shannon's Sunday Times and New York Times-bestselling series Tunuva Melim is a sister of the Priory. Mark Hyatt's phrasing is completely idiosyncratic and given he learned literacy later in life, it makes it all the more impressive. Inwardly, I observe that I’m not suffering from leprosy; anyway, eyes were made for looking and as we’re not permitted to touch everything we fancy, we have to make do with sight alone. Its protagonist Leda is regularly amusing and razor sharp, but not necessarily always likeable - he is at times rude and arrogant, living with no fixed address and floating between benefactors.His selected poems, So Much For Life, edited by Sam Ladkin and Luke Roberts, is forthcoming with Nightboat Books (2023). Further satisfaction is found in the passages of dialogue – urbane rallies of quick wit, indicating Hyatt had unfulfilled designs on the theatre – and Love, Leda’s portrayal of a stratum of 1960s London that both stands apart from the picture-postcard Carnaby Street image and, in a way, helped bring that into existence. He strolls down Old Brompton Road, loving how deliciously dressed the ‘gay ones,’ are, sits outside the Tate Gallery dreamily watching the lights on the Thames. While the ‘Note on the text and the author’ tells more about the life and writing career of Hyatt, who is best known for his poetry. He is often caught up in feeling which he cannot control and sex is viewed often as a way to inflict pain on himself as much as it is a release or a way of sharing intimacy.