Address Book

LONGLISTED FOR THE POLARI PRIZE 2022 ‘Gay love and desire, past and present,
has never been so beautifully articulated as in Neil Bartlett’s Address Book.
He takes us into the homes and minds of a handful of strangers and then—in
prose full of gentle foreboding—slowly peels away the layers until their
truths are revealed. Defiant, potent—and ultimately uplifting.’ JULIAN CLARY
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. ‘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.