Loved this book. Thought the cover looked fun and decided to buy on a whim. It’s a really fun read and moves at quite a pace. It’s a queer story but not just for queer people. Anyone will enjoy this book.

This is a sweet and funny book that really took me by surprise. I read about the first third of it with mounting disappointment. Oh author (oh publishers), I was thinking, you promised me so much and now you’re not really giving it to me. And I wondered: as the writer is quite young, is he actually making a mashup of Adrian Mole, Warren from This Life, and Brandon from Attachments (got my 80s, 90s and 00s refs in there) – as some kind of early Almodóvar movie – without realising it? However, as things start to drastically unravel for the narrator Danny, and the novel comes to the boil around two thirds of the way through (this simmering is very deftly maintained at close-to-fever-pitch right to the end) Fry starts to do some pretty clever stuff. And so once I felt in safe hands there, I just couldn’t put it down and stayed up till 2am to finish it. I think he really does give us a new twist on the introspective coming of age genre, in a twenty-something, Secret Life of Us, shared-house environment. It’s packed with complex, loveable (and hateable) characters, loads of good lines, and just the right amount of feelgoods. Thanks to Orion and Netgalley for the advance review copy.