Published in 2022
384 pages
Lauren John Joseph was born in Liverpool and lives in London. They write for the page, the stage, and the screen. Their film and performance work has been shown internationally across the UK, US, Europe, and Asia. They are the author of the plays Boy in a Dress and A Generous Lover, as well as the experimental prose volume Everything Must Go. This is their first novel.
What is this book about?
From an electrifying new voice, a “stone-cold masterpiece” (Olivia Laing) of queer friendship, first love, and unbridled youth.
It’s four in the morning, and our narrator is walking home from the club when they realize the date is February 29th-the birthday of the man who was something like their first love. Piecing together art, letters, and memory, they set about trying to write the story of a doomed affair that first sparked and burned a decade ago.
Ten years earlier, our young narrator and a boy named Thomas James fall into bed with one another over the summer of their graduation. Their ensuing affair, with its violent, animal intensity and its intoxicating and toxic power plays initiates a dance of repulsion and attraction that will cross years, span continents, drag in countless victims-and culminate in terrible betrayal.
At Certain Points We Touch is a story of first love and last rites, conjured against a vivid backdrop of London, San Francisco, and New York-a riotous, razor-sharp coming-of-age story that marks the arrival of an extraordinary new talent.
