Set in London across a single, life-altering summer, Isaac interrogates masculinity and queerness in the digital age and offers a fresh take on desire and intimacy, adolescent obsession and dangerous first love.
After inexperienced seventeen-year-old Isaac loses his virginity through a dating app – a disappointing yet addictive experience – he spends his final months before university escaping into a dizzying new world of casual sex with forgettable men. This all changes when he meets twenty-eight-year-old Harrison at a party.
Isaac is immediately infatuated by the handsome, charismatic artist, but while they grow closer, his sense of self becomes increasingly hazy. Harrison’s demands shift constantly, and after Isaac tries everything to prove his worthiness, he must take a hard look at his ideas about love, sex and men, and his relationship with himself.
THE FACTS
📕Stunning writing
📗authentic coming-of-age story
📘emotional and engaging
📙Queer literature at its best.
THE REVIEW
This book is stunning. I have sat with it for a few days since I finished because I was still thinking about it and didn’t feel like I should attempt a review. I think what happened was that I had whiplash from the speed at which this story sent me back to my youth.
There are quite a few coming-of-age queer novels, but this one aims true. The world is huge when you’re on the cusp of adulthood. Sometimes, we end up in situations that we don’t yet have the tools to deal with – and these are (in my personal experience) some of the most visceral and life-altering.
Why is it so easy to lose your sense of who you are at the very moment when you’re discovering it? That’s exactly what begins to happen to Isaac as he takes his first steps into the world of sex on dating apps. Once he meets Harrison he begins to lose himself a little. He’s learning about the queer community, life, relationships, the world… everything all at once and he’s at the centre of the storm.
The writing in this novel is gorgeous. There were many passages that I read more than once because they so perfectly captured a moment. I’m definitely going to read anything that Curtis Garner writes. It’s exciting to read such a captivating book and know that there will be more stories from the same mind in my future.
Isaac leant forward, his heartbeat quickening. “I tried so hard to be close to you, to understand you. I can’t put any of it into words. I felt like I had everything with you and also felt like nothing. It makes me sound so fucking pathetic, but I felt honoured and privileged to be with you, but when I’m with you I’m no one. Nothing. And I fucking hated myself. I wish I could hate you for making me feel like that, because then I’d have something to consolidate it.” He’d tried to imagine anger being this easy—something he could put a pin in and forget about.
THE LINKS
I purchased my copy of Isaac from my local independent bookstore: Terrier Books
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