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Radical Love
  • Published: 1 June 2023
  • ISBN: 9781529152210
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $28.00
Categories:

Radical Love

Formats & editions
Paperback
10 Sept 2024
EBook
1 June 2023
Audiobook
1 June 2023
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'Neil Blackmore re-imagines an astounding story of gay men in London 200 years ago and under the pain of their betrayal and injustice, he uncovers loyalty and above all, love. I relished every page.'
SIR IAN MCKELLEN

Welcome to England, 1809. London is a violent, intolerant city, exhausted by years of war, beset by soaring prices and political tensions. By day, John Church preaches on the radical possibilities of love to a multicultural, working-class congregation in Southwark. But by night, he crosses the river to the secret and glamorous world of a gay molly house on Vere Street, where ordinary men reinvent themselves as funny, flirtatious drag queens and rent boys cavort with labourers and princes alike. There, Church becomes the first minister to offer marriages between men, at enormous risk.

Everything changes when Church meets the unworldly and free-thinking Ned, part of a group of African activist abolitionists who attend his chapel. The two bond over their broken childhoods, and Church falls obsessively in love with Ned's tender nature. In a fragile, colourful secret world under threat, Church's love for Ned takes him to the edge of reason.

Based on the incredible true story of one of the most important events in queer history, Radical Love is a sensuous and prescient story about gender and sexuality, and how the most vulnerable survive in dangerous times.
  • Published: 1 June 2023
  • ISBN: 9781529152210
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $28.00
Categories:

About the author

Neil Blackmore

Neil Blackmore never had any intention of becoming a writer. He wrote his first novel at work to fill time at a boring job. He published his first novel in his twenties but then spent most of his thirties travelling the world. THE INTOXICATING MR LAVELLE is his third novel. He lives in London.

portrait photo of Neil Blackmore

Also by Neil Blackmore

The Intoxicating Mr Lavelle
The Dangerous Kingdom of Love
Objects of Desire
See all

Praise for Radical Love

Forget Bridgerton. Neil Blackmore's Radical Love give us the people of Regency England and its people as they really were; brutally intolerant, scarred by slavery, marred by oppression and social injustice. Don't look for heroes here - look for life as it's really lived, people as they really are.

ANNIE GARTHWAITE, author of Cecily

Neil Blackmore re-imagines an astounding story of gay men in London 200 years ago and under the pain of their betrayal and injustice, he uncovers loyalty and above all, love. I relished every page.

SIR IAN MCKELLEN

Radical Love is both a searing portrayal of love and obsession, and breathtaking in its depiction of the brutality and hypocrisy of prejudice, all told in sharp, beautiful prose. An unforgettable book.

ELIZABETH LEE, author of Cunning Women

I was staggered by this book; one of the boldest novelistic explorations of desire I have read in some time. Frighteningly prescient, it shines a light on the world-making possibilities of erotic transgression and the violence that so often comes in its wake.

KEIRAN GODDARD, author of Hourglass

Utterly compelling. So beautifully written, so many twists and turns and achingly sad moments where I gasped aloud. I haven't read a novel that's tugged at my heartstrings as much as this since John Boyne's The Heart's Invisible Furies. A must-read ... I'll be thinking about it for a long time to come.

JOHN MARRS

Blackmore has taken the historical facts and created an imaginative, layered, clever story that explores male desire in an intolerant time. With wit and aplomb he performed a similar trick in The Dangerous Kingdom of Love, riffing on the gay life of the polymath Francis Bacon. Radical Love confirms Blackmore as being one of the most original voices in historical fiction today.

ANTONIA SENIOR, The Times

A page-turner

MARIANKA SWAIN, The Telegraph

Full of urgent questions about individual and collective freedoms, and the writing of history...Compellingly real.

Daily Mail

A tale of courage and survival, richly imagined and full of pitch-perfect period detail and sly wit.

The Bookseller

A complex, thought-provoking tale, and a must-read for anyone seeking to explore the intersections of love, resistance, and the triumph of the human spirit.

Buzz Listings

A celebration of the erotic lives of long-dead gay Londoners and a lament for past persecutions, Radical Love is a powerful story of desire flourishing amid danger.

NICK RENNISON, The Sunday Times

Blunt, raw and unapologetically sexual, Radical Love is a story of human flaws, the dangers of both honesty and deception, and idealism in the face of cruel reality.

The Herald

Holding up a lens to a 19th century existence while asking uncomfortable questions of our own times, it explores how a high price must be paid in the pursuit of love.

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