This early sequence can be a tough read much as I tried to concentrate on the considerable beauties of the prose, I have rarely encountered a more self-pitying or unhappy queer narrator. In the book’s opening third – which was first published five years ago as a self-contained novella – the teacher becomes obsessed with a well-endowed male prostitute whom he meets while cruising in a Soviet-era public toilet in the basement of the National Palace of Culture.

The first-person narrator of the novel is a not-so-young American, and he’s working at the American College of Sofia as a teacher of literature, just as Greenwell himself once did. By the end of this short, intense novel it becomes clear that the collision between our hard-won new capacity for frankness and a deep-rooted sense of archaic guilt and grief is precisely Greenwell’s subject. Alienated sex with a financially dependent and forever unknowable object of desire the unresolved trauma of parental rejection the overriding conviction that guilt-stained autobiographical disclosure is what gay men do best – at times I felt as if I was reading an updated, gender-swapped rewrite of La Prisonnière. It documents three phases in an unnamed author’s infatuation with a Bulgarian hustler, and the various settings and transactions involved are described with a detached, carefully styled literary brutalism that feels very of the moment however, the emotional geography of the story could have come straight from Proust. Poet and critic Garth Greenwell’s first full-length novel, which arrives this side of the Atlantic loaded with praise, is a fine example of this creative double-bind.

Our daily lives are changing fast, and often radically for the better meanwhile, our fictional tropes and structures are still firmly anchored in the literary past. C ontemporary male queer fiction is in a strange place.

What belongs to you greenwell