Queer Fiction Reading Group

For the ninth installment of Sanna's Queer Fiction reading group, we will read Lauren J. Joseph's debut At Certain Points We Touch. This is a story about first love and last rites, conjured against a vivid backdrop of London, San Francisco, and New York: a riotous, razor-sharp coming-of-age tale that marks the arrival of an extraordinary new talent.

There’s no need to prepare but if you feel like it, please feel free to mention a passage or character you particularly liked (or disliked!) from the novel over the course of the evening.

It's four in the morning, and our narrator is walking home from the club when they realise 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.