Isaac

After inexperienced seventeen-year-old Isaac loses his virginity through a dating app - a disappointing yet addictive experience - he spends his final months before university escaping into a dizzying new world of casual sex with forgettable men. This all changes when he meets twenty-eight-year-old Harrison at a party. Isaac is immediately infatuated by the handsome, charismatic artist, but while they grow closer, his sense of self becomes increasingly hazy. Harrison's demands shift constantly, and after Isaac tries everything to prove his worthiness, he must take a hard look at his ideas about love, sex and men, and his relationship with himself.

So vivid and real, it brought a thousand memories rushing back... I loved the sheer power of Isaac's emotions, overwhelming him - that lovely, awful, endless battle, asking of your boyfriend: who are you? Which is really asking: who am I?, Truly impressive: funny, melancholic and acutely real. Isaac takes me back to my own adolescence in London, to being on the precipice of adult life... bracing and uncensorious, I loved Isaac. It's so carefully written, sexually candid but full of warmth and longing, populated by relatable, believable, flesh-and-blood characters. Deeply satisfying in its elegance and tenderness, A luminous and beautiful debut about coming-of-age in London today. An instant queer classic, Compulsively readable, Isaac is both an entertaining bildungsroman and a hyper-real snapshot of contemporary gay life for an artistically precocious and charmingly naïve young man. I rooted for Isaac all the way through, and now I'm rooting for Curtis Garner to write more novels

CURTIS GARNER was born in Cornwall in 1996. When he was eighteen, he moved to London to study Creative Writing and English Literature at the University of Greenwich. He graduated in 2017 and has been working in publishing since. In 2020, he also received an MA with Distinction from Manchester School of Creative Writing, where much of Isaac was written. In his spare time, he reviews novels on Instagram (@queernovels). He lives in Hackney.