That this book—an unflinching portrait of working-class precarity and queer estrangement, desire, and loneliness—was only published in January this year, 50-odd years after the author's tragic death by suicide, is a testament to the many buried registers of gay life that remain unarchived, unacknowledged, and obscured to this day. At this moment I can hardly understand myself, for I am stimulated by my own emptiness and have no idea how to develop the self in me. For fifty years, she has trained to slay wyrms - but none have appeared since the Nameless One, and the younger generation.

It is an exploration of queerness and loneliness with fleeting moments of tenderness and joyful abandon as Leda tries to find where he belongs, his meaning in life, and of course, love. With an intensity of life-in-motion, a lyric of spirit and survival in pursuit of the existential, Hyatt vividly conjures his protagonist’s navigation of an era’s incipient edges.Written in the mid 60s but only published recently, ‘Love, Leda’ is a poetic portrait of working-class queerness and of a sordid Soho now vanished. I look out of the window and see a group of young lads out for a laugh, but the size of the window breaks my view. 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. Seller has stated it will dispatch the item within 1 working day upon receipt of cleared payment - opens in a new window or tab .

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Some of the passages grappling with depression and Leda’s chaotic lifestyle are worth framing in a museum, whereas some passages of narrative are well worth forgetting.Love, Leda is a short novel by Mark Hyatt (1940 -1972), published posthumously in 2023, having been unearthed some 51 years after the author’s death. It is a novel of gestures and glances, homosexuality being still illegal at this point, but once in private our characters embrace the life they’re never allowed to show.

Mark Hyatt's phrasing is completely idiosyncratic and given he learned literacy later in life, it makes it all the more impressive. Having moved to Lancashire with his then boyfriend, Atom, in the mid- to late 60s, he continued writing without much success and eventually killed himself just outside Blackburn in 1972, after the end of his relationship led to a prolonged period of crisis. Laid out as a sideways coffee table, the extracts from the book are dotted amongst commentaries about the life of the author, Mark Hyatt. On the surface, Love, Leda is a straightforward narrative stroll around 1960s Soho, taking in the sights and the characters of the age in variously humorous, awkward and sinister encounters. I cry because I can't understand it and I am constantly in dreams that somehow I hope time will not cure.Conscious that he’s probably experienced more in life than his own (estranged) father has, and more, ‘it’s no wonder I get bored with life from time to time. I see a pop-star change into the dress of an emperor; a herd of poets in paradise playing roulette for beautiful women.