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Neil says, ‘Every place I’ve ever slept in, I’ve always wondered about what went on at that address before I moved in. 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.
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James’ church is closed, Tom confronts the violent sexual assault he suffered whilst a seminarian at Ash Burrow – and the perpetrator, Derek Worrell, who is now the Bishop of Preston.Īddress Book is the new work of fiction by the Costa-shortlisted author of Skin Lane. In contrast, we see Tom’s teenage-self approaching life with a sense of potential. The story follows Tom’s emotional collapse and the deterioration of his mental health until he reaches the point where he is actively suicidal. At Ash Burrow seminary, Tom finds acceptance and other gay men like himself. After they sleep together for the first time, as the pressure to conform to a heterosexual society reaches fever-pitch, Tom abandons his lover and flees to the Church.
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As Tom grows into adolescence the confusion begins: he has experiences with girls, as well as burgeoning romantic and sexual feelings for his friend, Antony.
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In the second timeline, the even numbered chapters, we see Tom from childhood through to his ordination as a priest. Antony, the only man Tom has ever fallen in love with, the man he abandoned thirty-years earlier, arrives to ask Tom to provide the Sacrament of the Sick to his dying mother. Tom is an in-the-closet gay man inside the Catholic Church, an organisation that defines homosexuality as inherently disordered. James’ church, a Jesuit-built church in a northern English town. In the odd-numbered chapters we meet Tom, an isolated fifty-year old parish priest of St. A Particular Friendship Paul Van Der SpiegelĪPF is a love story about a gay Catholic priest coming to terms with his sexuality.