The New Life

Tom Crewe Chatto & Windus £16.99

This assured debut unspools the erotic and intellectual quandaries of a group of middle-class radicals whose quest for sexual liberty in late-Victorian England runs aground amid the moral panic sparked by Oscar Wilde’s arrest for gross indecency. Fictionalising real lives, the action involves a scandalous study of gay desire by two writers, Henry Ellis and John Addington, the latter a married father whose buttoned-up lust spills out ever more riskily once he falls for a younger man. Sexy, cerebral and moving.