[rating=4]
329 pages • Serpent’s Tail • 7 March, 2013 [PB]

Petite Mort, by Beatrice Hitchman is a book that is by turns sensitive and coarse, gentle and brutal, beguiling and horrifying.

“This secretive ménage à trois, conducted in the claustrophobic atmosphere of the Durand’s grand but isolated home in the Bois de Boulogne on the outskirts of Paris, becomes stifling and, ultimately, destructive.”

[rating=3]
248 pages • Wilkinson House • 1 December, 2012 [PB]

Two stories, a gay love story in 2011, and a straight love story in 1914. Yet what is it that connects the two?

“In one sense both stories are, to a greater or lesser degree, about forbidden love. The gay storyline in modern Tel Aviv is hardly transgressive in its context but, for the older man, Niv, it nonetheless brings about a mental collapse.”

[rating=4]
238 pages • Summertime Publishing • 15 December, 2011 [PB]

Perking The Pansies sees a forty-something gay couple move to Turkey and into the midst of Imperial minded ex-pats.

“By working their way round the map of the Mediterranean, Jack and Liam eventually settle on Turkey as being both affordable and, for a Muslim country at least, reasonably tolerant.”

[rating=4]
307 pages • Paradise Press • June 23, 2012 [PB]

Tim Bennett-Goodman finds Rod Shelton’s first novel fast-paced, picaresque romp which is funny, sexy and intriguing by turns.

“In this blackly-comic novel, high drama meets high camp and the reader is rewarded with raunchy gay sex amongst a bevy of beautiful boys, in every imaginable position, on almost every other page.”

[rating=4]
246 pages • Quartet • June 7, 2012 [PB]

Allan Massie’s Dark Summer in Bordeaux, the sequel to Death in Bordeaux, is a worthy successor.

“Massie evokes this increasingly unstable society exceptionally well and provides the reader with a real sense of the anxiety and insecurity that must have ruled the lives of all who lived in Pétain’s ‘French State’.”

[rating=4]
260 pages • Quartet • June 01, 2011 [PB]

Tim Bennett-Goodman takes pleasure in Death in Bordeaux, which charts the working and personal life of a police detective from the fall of France through the establishment and early days of the Vichy Republic.

Massie doesn’t shrink from the casual homophobia of the times. Even the most sympathetic of his characters find homosexuality impossible to comprehend, if not actually repellant.