This book featured in the 2025 version of the influential and frequently literary-prize-prescient annual Observer Best Debut Novelist feature (last year included Colin Barrett and Kaliane Bradley, 2023
Tom Crewe. Michael Magee and Jacqueline Crooks – and earlier years have featured Natasha Brown, Caleb Azumah Nelson, Douglas Stuart, Sally Rooney, Rebecca Watson, Yara Rodrigues Fowler, JR Thorp Bonnie Garmus, Gail Honeyman among many others).

The author Anthony Shapland is an artist writer and curator from South Wales – and from the Literature Wales website his bio says “He grew up in an era that was only just starting to shift its social, legal and moral attitudes toward gay men, and the desire to ‘not stand out’, even after ‘coming out’, has had a lasting impact on all of his work. He is currently working with fiction, in short form and novella”.

And that serves as a perfect introduction to this book – as it is a novella (145 or so generously spaced pages) describing in sparse but tender prose a burgeoning but hidden love story between two quiet men (both who have developed over the years strategies precisely to not stand out)

The novel begins in very late 1987 (the year of the 1987 election where ant-homosexuality was part of the Tories attack campaign on Neil Kinnock’s attempts to rebuild Michael Foot’s Labour leading to the Section 28 legislation the next year and the year of the AIDS: Don’t Die of Ignorance leaflet campaign) in a South Wales village suffering from the aftermath of the 1984-85 Miners Strike both in terms of de-industrialisation and in the bitter personal disputes left behind.

The two men are known to us only as M and B.

M – who we can date from the Aberfan disaster the year he turned 9 as 30 at the novel’s beginning, has inherited his father’s ironmongery business (and his quiet position and status in the town). He has a child from a one-off encounter when he was 16, the child living with her mother and stepfather, his only real company int the flat above his shop a cat Tigr (his mother having predeceased his father)

B is around 10 years younger – his father (separated from his mother) has recently died and he currently is living in the council housing, but faces eviction as he has fallen off the Council list. At school – youngest of four siblings – he was something of a rebel using rebellion and music as a shield from the thing that really separated him from his schoolmates and family (his sexuality) and now he yearns to leave the Valleys.

At the book’s opening the two having forged a connection in the pub, agree to meet on the part hill, part slagheap outside the town on New Year’s Eve (something of a tradition for M) and form a tentative connection there – immediately we understand the life of careful concealment of their unfulfilled longings both have lived.

How often has [B] stared into the mirror at this hidden him? An understudy, carefully learning lines and behaviours; waiting in the wings to take the stage. Trying to understand how it is to be in this small town, a boy in this world.

[M] looks inward to something he can’t speak aloud. Something he rolls toward in countless night grunts. An imagined climax, forbidden, hidden behind locked toilet doors, under heavy blankets that pin down the deed. The hunger for another body, for a person to know, to see what he knows, to share. He’s filled with guilt. What is he doing up here? He feels caught out, seen doing something he ought not. Sadness sinks through him in an obscure confusion of fear and shame. The heavy impossibility of the shop, of the valley below—

Shortly after M advertises for an assistant and B picking up the hint applies; shortly after he is taken in as a lodger and then the two become lovers – albeit lovers whose very connection is meticulously hidden from the village and friends/family – leading to some tensions at Christmas and when M is asked to give away his daughter ….. the dear of discovery hanging over them, particularly as national events occasionally reveal the stark prejudices of the villagers to homosexuality.

Although set in a post-industrial town – there is some beautiful nature writing, at its strongest when it resonates with M and B’s lives and thoughts – the short chapter “Brimstone” is a particular highlight.

And this beautiful and quiet book has a painful yet poignant ending.

Recommended.

In a small Welsh village in the late 1980s, B is swept up in village bonhomie when M buys a Christmas round for everyone in the pub. M has taken over his late father’s hardware shop where the hard times of the miners’ strike and the ensuing unemployment were acknowledged with credit. He and B exchange a look and a chat, arranging to meet on New Year’s Eve. They carefully find their way to a relationship that becomes love, B working in M's shop and living in the makeshift bedsitter above next to M’s room. Downstairs they continue their performance of staff and shopkeeper, stifling their horror at the screaming ‘gay plague’ tabloid headlines announcing HIV/AIDS, quoted in tones of disgust by customers. Upstairs they’ve discovered a passion and love which feels like home.
Shapland’s novella is delivered in a series of short chapters arranged in brief paragraphs, full of evocative images vividly summoning up the Welsh landscape. The relationship between B and M is beautifully drawn, each of them terrified of exposure, careful to conceal a love that has taken them both by surprise, a happiness that can’t be shared with family. Their public days together are hedged around with self-restraint and a performance of straightness lest anyone guess their true relationship. Shapland captures how exhausting that must be, and how infuriating. It’s a striking piece of writing, beautiful and moving, brief but extraordinarily powerful.