Love, Leda

Product Information

If you loved Catcher in the Rye, The Bell Jar or Everything I Know About Love, you’ll love this book too. It’s a life filled with potential intimacies that can only be mediated and negotiated by body language – a nod of the head, a look or a gesture that will subvert the illegal act of men finding each other for sex. I haven’t written to him for some time now and I feel he needs the tranquillity of love in a letter.

Given Mark Hyatt's struggles with his mental health whilst alive and his eventual suicide in 1972, one can speculate that the internal workings of such a jaded figure can't be too far from his own. His head goes under the pillow and pulls out a tube of lubrication, to reduce the friction and half of the pain. I am without an address so I sit on the floor out of sheer tiredness and join them (the learned ones). He tries to find a good time among the furtive but excitable underground gay scene, or in the cottages and building sites.Liked lots about this, but was very frustrated about the way the middle aged woman's body was described in such a derogative tone and it felt like the male characters had more space for variations within their gender bracket than the female ones. Mark Hyatt's phrasing is completely idiosyncratic and given he learned literacy later in life, it makes it all the more impressive. 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. Perhaps Love, Leda offers us more value as a cultural document rather than a novel on its own terms, but through its candid exploration of a world truly in the past Hyatt offers us an open and frank account of gay life that is years ahead of its time.

Near the beginning of the book, Leda seemed to me an arrogant little sod who I struggled to understand. Why has instinct made today an eye-opener, my mind issuing facts through my body with the result that I obtain no satisfaction? Walking up the steps he opens the street door, leads me along a dark passage into a back room and turns on a yellow light. Reflecting the author’s brief but brilliant life, this is a gem of a read both in substance and in historian queer storytelling.Not for the coffee itself but because they have paper serviettes and I can drop a line to Terry in Bristol. Although declaring himself open to experience, this doesn’t appear to include the experience of work.

It was an attempt to unstuff the class-bound, moralising culture that had choked British life since the Victorian era, and free people to think, and act, for themselves. A lot of the narrative is taken up by long passages where Leda merely pontificates on the meaning of life, coming out with quasi-philosophical lines such as ‘It’s hard for me to believe that I exist and at the same time to accept my delusions’. Featuring a vibrant rainbow design, and our super-sized Q logo, you won't find a more stylish way to make a statement. Not a perfect novel by any means, but a frank one, and great all the same: it is lucky, incredibly lucky for us that it remains a lost work no more.So good, a really special read - the narrative is aggressively poetic and and the descriptions of London from the 60s ring so familiar. For much of the novel consists of rather mundane accounts of the protagonist's daily life, spent crashing with various acquaintances and scrounging out a living doing casual jobs; having meaningless sex with a plethora of both male and female hookups in sometimes graphic detail.

By turns, audacious and affecting, Hyatt’s semi-autobiographical novel gives us a handful of days in the company of Leda, depressed narcissist and self-proclaimed ‘social bum’. We’re here to help you find that book that you can’t put down, the book you’ll push on all your friends, the book that’ll change your life. Leda's story, narrated here in a poetic and idiosyncratic manner, is stark and revealing of the grey-white expanse of London in the 1960s—a world of tepid coffees cooling in chipped ceramic mugs, of dilapidated pre-war flats converted into shabby bedsits, of casual workers washing up cups for a day's living, and bars of jazz floating out from seedy Soho coffeehouses—and those who, like our protagonist, moved aimlessly about it. I, the brave one, god of any telephone kiosk, walk down Dean Street, see the man of the day; raincoat, shoulders round, hair black, falling out; heavenly blue eyes cast down into his own hell.

Infelizmente, Hyatt falece precocemente por suicídio em 1972, como muitos de seus contemporâneos, talvez pela desilusão de que a contracultura e as utopias não mudaram a humanidade e o mundo e pela premonição e intuição extrassensorial que os verdadeiros artistas têm, um senso de antecipação, de que o mundo iria a cada década se tornar cada vez mais inóspito e distópico. This newly discovered, never-before-published novel - which predates the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 - is a portrait of lost a Soho, as well as an important document of queer, working-class life, from a voice long overlooked. I cry because I can't understand it and I am constantly in dreams that somehow I hope time will not cure.