MARIA DUARTE, FIONA O’CONNOR and ANDY HEDGECOCK review Savage House, Enzo, Madfabulous, and Erupcja
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Poignant meditation on the ‘squalid and precious’ experiences of sex, identity and loss
CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
Desire: A Memoir
by Jonathan Dollimore
(Bloomsbury, £19.99)
IN JONATHAN DOLLIMORE'S unflinching memoir, the writer, academic and cultural critic deals openly with issues of sexual identity, lost love and the gay sub-cultures of the 1970s to the 1990s.
It begins with a poignant vignette in which Dollimore, a teenage boy from a working-class background, sees his mother in her car with an adult friend of the family who is trying to have sex with her — a man who'd also been having sex with him, “teaching” him to desire.
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MARJORIE MAYO welcomes an account of family life after Oscar Wilde, a cathartic exercise, written by his grandson
PETER MASON is entertained by the autobiography of Charlie Harper, one of punk’s most enduring figures
The book feels like a writer working within his limits and not breaking any new ground, believes KEN COCKBURN
MARIA DUARTE and ANGUS REID review Friendship, Four Letters of Love, Tin Soldier and The Ballad of Suzanne Cesaire