A Room Above A Shop by Anthony Shapland

Alt text/Image description: the cover of the novel, a pale background with a green mountain shape rising from the bottom (containing the author's name) and a black mountain shape looming down from the top (with the title).

A Room Above A Shop is a literary fiction novel set to be published by Granta on 13th March 2025.

Anthony Shapland’s A Room Above A Shop follows two queer men, B and M, in 1980s Wales. Despite never mentioning her by name, this heartbreaking novel is backdropped by Thatcher's horrific tenure as Prime Minister (particularly the queerphobic Section 28), and deals with themes of alienation, ignorance, shame, love, expectation.

When M, an ironmonger taking on the family hardware store, hires B as a new employee and lodger, sparks fly in secret, away from bigoted residents, despite an 11-year age gap.

The novel has chapters that are more like vignettes, there's something vital and fleeting about them, with poetic descriptions almost listed like observations but still maintaining an air of beauty. The language and descriptions are so vivid and sibilant that there were times when I couldn't help but read aloud, as the words felt like they needed to be spoken, the sounds knitting together a further layer to the description. Often these remind me of some of the very visceral poetry I enjoy and have written myself in the past.

A raw look at the state of being gay in a deeply homophobic era, Shapland exemplifies how far we've come, and just how far we have to go. The deep personal shame B and M feel really resonates even with a distance of forty years.

My initial reaction on finishing A Room Above A Shop was ‘wow’, words failing, and I just know this story will stay with me for a long time.

Alt text/Image description: the cover of the novel, a pale background with a green mountain shape rising from the bottom (containing the author's name) and a black mountain shape looming down from the top (with the title).

I Hear You by Paul McVeigh

Image description/alt text: the story's cover, features a pair of legs under a tall stack of boom boxes and tape players, almost as if it is all one coherent being or the person carrying them is obscured by them.

I Hear You by Paul McVeigh is a short story collection which will be published on 3rd March 2025 by Salt Publishing.

I was drawn to this book by not only the cover, but McVeigh's other book The Good Son is one that I have been wanting to read for some time. As a queer writer of Irish descent myself, I'm always looking at the best and newest voices in the field, and McVeigh's is a name that keeps coming up, for good reason. And given Salt’s track record with writers like A.J. Ashworth (one of my favourite short story writers), I knew that the quality of writing would be only the absolute best.

Split into two sections, the collection starts with three standalone stories, followed by a set of interconnected stories collectively titled The Circus.

The stories featured in I Hear You were originally written for radio, and you can feel this from the opening of Tickles, the very first story featured. This does nothing to dampen the quality of the prose, but you can definitely see how the pieces would be enhanced by the spoken aspect.

By turns tender, raw and unflinching, I Hear You shows McVeigh as a modern great in writing the small, human moments that make up the big events that change lives. I don't remember the last time a story made me feel anything quite as viscerally as the second story, Cuckoo, a standout for me.

Maybe I'm biased, being queer myself, but another standout for me is Daddy Christmas, a poignant and all-too-relatable take on change and regret in the face of gay singledom. Even though I can't say I personally have ever wanted children, this story spoke to me (spoke for me almost) in ways I can't even begin to coherently express.

The Circus features ten short pieces focussing on different people associated with a new club in Belfast hosting a Got Talent competition, thus all the stories take the role of the central character as their title (The Glamourous Assistant - a personal favourite, The Comedian, The Judge and The Organiser, for example) and this is an approach I really enjoyed.

I could talk for hours about each story individually because they have all left some kind of mark on me that I am yet to fully be able to articulate. Each story deals with the protagonist being overshadowed and/or alienated by someone/thing close to them in some way, and McVeigh is brilliant at this, there are thirteen stories in this collection and they all explore a different form of weighty expectation brought on by existing alongside another person who is deemed ‘better’ and I have to say I am in awe of his ability to do this.

It’s safe to say that I practically devoured this book, mostly just taking breaks between stories to let the weight of them sink in.

Few writers could so expertly write endearing characters and bigoted, irredeemable ones, too. The Medium is a timely exploration of religion, celebrity, consumer culture and the internet from the perspective of someone charging people subscription fees to talk to God and get a mortgage in heaven.

A master of realistic, distinctive voices, McVeigh's I Hear You is a timely, queer collection with drag queens, musicality and pop culture references ranging from Ariana Grande to The Scarlet Pimpernel (how much camper can you get?)

Seriously, what more could you ask for?

Image description/alt text: the story's cover, features a pair of legs under a tall stack of boom boxes and tape players, almost as if it is all one coherent being or the person carrying them is obscured by them.

On Rejection

‘Don’t take it to heart, move on and find something better’

Everyone keeps telling me that rejection is ‘character building’ or ‘making space for what’s meant to be’ in life. Cynthia Erivo recently said something similar in an interview with a young girl who missed out on the role of her character’s younger self in the Wicked film adaptation. I was honestly surprised by how willingly my brain took this advice, given how hopeless I feel in the face of rejection. Was it Erivo’s natural charisma and presence? Her phrasing? The fact that she is a fellow queer person?

Rejection is something I have always struggled with, hated even. And being the fat, gay, nerdy kid at school, I was always picked last for teams in PE. You would think I wouldn’t care, given how much I hate sports, but even in that situation I became an embarrassed, ashamed wreck.

The last 18 months have been… eventful, to say the least. I got ill, dropped out of my master's, broke up with my partner, fell out with my uni “friends” (if you could call them that). And that was just the beginning. I've had and left my first paid job, chatted to multiple people thinking that we would get somewhere romantically (and been proven wrong for various reasons), been on holiday to Derbyshire, Ireland, and the Yorkshire coast (twice) and, following a break of also around 18 months, started writing again. I also started submitting work to various presses/journals/magazines once again.

And opened the rejection floodgates once again…

When you get a reply from a job you’ve applied for or a literary press/magazine you have submitted work to, you often see phrases like ‘we’re sorry but on this occasion we won’t be progressing your application further’ or ‘thank you for trusting us with your words, but we are unable to take your work’. Now, don’t get me wrong, this is much better than not getting a response at all, which is something that happens far too often when an automated response takes two minutes to write and a button press to send. However, these do sometimes come across like the popular, rich, blonde girl from a 2000s Disney Channel show (see Gigi in Wizards of Waverly Place; Lexi in A.N.T. Farm) ‘apologising’ in the loosest possible terms. ‘Sorry’ with a grimace and an internal monologue of ‘that I ever had to acknowledge your existence’ following it.

It is incredibly hard not to let these situations get you down, as we are so often told not to do. This comes under the same category as ‘have you tried not being depressed?’ and ‘cheer up, might never happen’ in the filing cabinet of things to say to people struggling with low mood (the category being ‘please shut the fuck up unless you want it to be the last thing you say to me ever’).

Cleopatra and Frankenstein

I just finished reading Coco Mellors’ Cleopatra and Frankenstein. You can see what I thought in my very quick GoodReads review. Beware spoilers ahead:

Cleopatra and Frankenstein by Coco Mellors
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Generally, I really enjoyed this book. But wow are there some problems with it, too. It is, for the most part, an interesting exploration of relationships and how they affect other people in our lives. The book feels weirdly inconsistent, though, and I do find the sudden bait and switch at the end from 'sympathise only with Cleo' to 'sympathise with Frank, too, guys!' in the tone odd.

I also think that the graphic description of 'the incident' as it is referred to is really unnecessary and experts have long said that describing/showing these events at all let alone in such detail is ill-advised at best and dangerous at worst (see experts' reactions to Netflix's 13 Reasons Why adaptation).

My biggest issue is with Quentin, however. I really don't understand what they add outside of the 'friends are affected by relationships, too' theme. I also really feel that Mellors' handling of Quentin's gender identity is... not great. Everyone still constantly calls Quentin 'him', the way Johnny says 'he thinks he's a girl', and outside of this the most it is referred to that Quentin is questioning is with wearing 'women's clothes' and in a sex scene with Alex (a whole other can of worms). As a non-binary person this just comes across as icky at best and purposely transphobic at worst (I don't think Mellors was trying to be transphobic with the portrayal but it really doesn't come across as great).

The most interesting sections of the book (somewhat unfortunately) are the two that follow Eleanor instead of the members of Frank and Cleo's friendship circles. The change in prose style works really well (if not better than the rest of the novel), and Eleanor, Jacky and Eleanor's mum are easily the most interesting characters featured (possibly followed by Zoe). It's such a shame that there are only two sections like this, they made me really confront the issues I had with the rest of the novel.

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The Ghost Woods by C.J. Cooke

Wow. Just wow. Where to start with The Ghost Woods?

C.J. Cooke’s The Ghost Woods follows Pearl and Mabel, two seemingly different girls who fall pregnant out of wedlock and end up at Lichen Hall under the charge of the foreboding Mrs Whitlock. Six years separate their stories initially and we see how they each cope with the strange goings on in the house.

A book dealing with themes of love, motherhood, queerness, otherness and fungus, The Ghost Woods takes a stark look at how women, particularly queer women, were treated in Scotland of the 1950s and 60s.

A dark, intriguing novel, it initially took me quite a while to get into. I can't quite put my finger on what I struggled with so much, but I'm so glad I persevered. I particularly loved the other girls in the house - Morven, Rahmi and Aretta, and the girls’ relationship with them and poor Sylvan. Mabel and Morven’s tragic love story really made the book gripping as I eased myself back into it and I was so gutted when it was brought to such an abrupt end. Honestly, it was practically a lesbian polycule looking after Sylvan for the first six years of his life and I think that's beautiful.

I haven't read the previous two books Cooke wrote as part of this thematically connected trio of novels, but I definitely will be. She is a master at making you doubt the facts in front of you and while I wasn't expecting a science lesson on fungus and mycology from a gothic novel about pregnant women I'm not complaining in the slightest.