Address Book

Address Book is the new work of fiction by the Costa-shortlisted author of Skin Lane. Neil Bartlett's cycle of stories takes us to seven very different times and situations: from a new millennium civil partnership celebration to erotic obsession in a Victorian tenement, from a council-flat bedroom at the height of the AIDS crisis to a doctor's living-room in the midst of the Coronavirus pandemic, they lead us through decades of change to discover hope in the strangest of places. Neil says, 'Every place I've ever slept in, I've always wondered about what went on at that address before I moved in. To write this book, I went back to some significant places in my own life and let the walls talk to me. The result of that listening is this new cycle of stories.' Editor Nathan Evans says, 'I've loved Neil's writing since finding his first book in the university library, so to publish his latest is something of a dream for me. Inkandescent are proud to be working with such an important queer writer with so much to say about where we are and how we got here.' 'Bartlett is a pioneer on and off the page and we are lucky to have him telling our stories'-DAMIAN BARR? 'One of England's finest writers'-EDMUND WHITE

Neil Bartlett was born in 1958. He grew up in Chichester, West Sussex, and now lives in Worthing and London with his partner of thirty-one years, author and archivist James Gardiner. He is the author of novels Mr. Clive and Mr. Page (1996), shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award, and published in the US under the title The House on Brooke Street; Ready To Catch Him Should He Fall (1990); and Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde (1988), a ground-breaking study which places Oscar Wilde in a wider gay historical and cultural context. This book won the Capital Gay Book of the Year Award. His most recent novels are Skin Lane (2007), shortlisted for the 2007 Costa Novel Award, and The Disappearance Boy (2014). He has also written several short stories.