Outside these doors is chaos. Appalling men are elected president. Every day's headlines are worse than the last. All year, it's been like that, and it isn't getting better. But it will.
The setting is New York in 1968. Patrick is the manager of Dooryard Books, a secondhand bookstore owned by the philanthropic Mrs Kaplan. One night, Mrs Kaplan turns up with a stranger, who she introduces as 'Nathaniel Smith': a man several years older than Patrick, with a haunted look and no possessions to speak of. Patrick can relate: he was one of Mrs K's 'projects' too, years ago.
Nathaniel (who's agoraphobic) clearly has guilty secrets, but Patrick is happy to let him take his time revealing them. And he has plenty else to distract him: soon after Nathaniel's arrival, Susan -- Patrick's sister-in-law and childhood friend, a well-known singer-songwriter -- shows up, distraught, with a suitcase, a baby, and a telegram from the Department of Defence. Susan's husband (Patrick's brother) Michael has been killed in Vietnam.
How the three of them (plus baby Eleanor) create a kind of family, and how Nathaniel comes to terms with his own sexuality, is the heart of the novel: it also features delightfully spiky Puerto Rican twins, a lot of discussion of Walt Whitman's poetry (Patrick is a huge fan), plenty of gay and trans secondary characters, anti-war protestors and political radicals and folk musicians, and a dog. The revelation of Nathaniel's secret past was a big surprise and definitely something to feel bad about, but he does his best to make things right, not only with Susan and Nathaniel but with the wider world.
Great depictions of male-female friendship, alternative culture, and the second-hand book trade. I listened to the audiobook, read by JJ Hawkins (who read Patrick's chapters) and Joel Leslie (who read Nathaniel's). I felt a bit uncomfortable while listening to Leslie, who sounded as though he was choking at the end of each sentence, but both narrators brought warmth, emotion and humour to their performances.
Read because: it was in the Libro.fm sale, and I have enjoyed other novels by Cat Sebastian.
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