At Certain Points We Touch – Lauren John Joseph

Paperback. Bloomsbury Publishing (Uk). 2022. New Condition. 

It’s four in the morning, and our narrator, a trans writer living in Mexico City, is walking home from the club when they realise that it’s February 29th – the birthday of the man who was something like their first love. Piecing together art, letters, dirty DMs and memory, they set about trying to write the story of a doomed love affair that first sparked and burned a decade ago. Ten years earlier, and our young narrator and a boy named Thomas James, long aware of one another across bars and readings and other murky late-night gatherings, fall into bed with one another over the summer of their graduation. Their ensuing affair, with its violent, animal intensity, its intoxicating and toxic power play, will initiate a dance of repulsion and attraction that will cross years, span continents, drag in countless victims – and culminate in terrible betrayal.

A riotous, razor-sharp bildungsroman, narrated with caustic wit and deep sorrow, At Certain Points We Touch is a story of first love and last rites, conjured against a vivid backdrop of queer London, San Francisco and New York – in all their colour, struggle, decadence and resilience.