Anthony Shapland’s debut novel is a quietly powerful tale of two men trying to keep their love secret amid a growing AIDS crisis and an intolerant community

whose relationship is whose existence The risk of exposure is a constant threat. love must remain a secret. homophobic, close-knit community.

It’s the late 1980s when M and B first notice each other in a pub. M is the good-natured owner of an ironmonger’s shop he inherited from his father. B is eleven years his junior, a somewhat directionless man still living at home.

There’s an undeniable spark between them that burgeons into love when B begins working in M’s shop and moves into a tiny bedroom above.

Neither of them know exactly what they are getting into so the intensity of their subsequent relationship takes them unaware. Though homosexuality is no longer illegal, gay men are still treated with suspicion and hostility. So M and B must live a lie, knowing the consequences if anyone In their town even suspected the truth

Exposed, they would be shamed. Shamed in the town that knows their fathers and their mothers, their brothers and sisters and their pets, and all the stories, lies and missteps they have ever taken as children, as boys, as men. It would mean leaving

In the shop they play their parts: shopkeeper and assistant. Taking care to never to let glances linger or to be physically close. But upstairs they can be themselves.

I loved the way Anthony Shapland gives symbolic weight to the title of his book. The room above the shop isn’t just a setting — it’s the emotional and thematic centre of the novel.

The shop is a public space, a place where they can be socially acceptable though only if they maintain a pretence. The room above, by contrast, represents a private, intimate and secret space where they can be honest and safe. The two spaces suggested to me the way LGBT people in the 1980s often had to live two parallel lives — one visible, one hidden.

The room is a place of shelter, yet it’s also fragile in some ways. M and B can only be safe by shutting themselves away and denying elements of “normal” life. B can’t risk inviting M to his family’s Christmas celebration so he goes alone. It’s out of the question that M can take B as his “plus one” to his daughter’s wedding.

Situations like this create a quiet sense of tension throughout the novel. The two men know that for them to be together, there must also be times apart.

The characters rarely articulate their feelings openly however — these two men are not given to lengthy descriptions of their emotions. Much of the emotional intensity of the book comes in fact from what is not said. This isn’t a prose heavy narrative nor does it follow a strictly linear time-line. It’s written in short fragments and vignettes which make the reader fill in some of the gaps and draw their own conclusions.

One of the gaps concerns the setting of the novel though there are enough clues to narrow it down to the South Wales valleys. This is a town long past its heyday as the source of high quality coal and the landscape bears the scars of its decline:

…a brownfield slicked in frost above the river and road, railway and town … The valley is shrinking. Houses fall apart, worthless. A place of industry now sagging, underfed, starved of purpose.

I have a strong suspicion that Anthony Shapland is describing the town of Bargoed where he was born (and where I lived as a child). Right at the end of the book a shop is named that was the ironmongers in the town for decades. When M and B climb a mountain early on in the novel, I knew instantly where they were:

Behind the town the hill rises, grown from mining spoil, load by load. It’s an unnatural mound poured from above , like sand funnelled through a slow hourglass. It grew until it settled, leaning back on the hollowed east mountain behind, an uneasy, weighty twin. The land held with trees in fear of slip.

Even I’m wrong about the personal connection, this book will be one of my favourites of this year. I loved the spare, almost poetic style, and the rawness of the emotion. This was Anthony Shapland’s debut. I can’t wait to find out what he does next.