The poet Seán Hewitt’s first foray into memoir unfolds in the nonlinear way favoured by many contemporary exponents of the form. We move with elegant fluidity between phases of Hewitt’s life: recollections of growing up near Liverpool with a developing sense of his queerness; his complex and furtive sexual experiences at university; the development of his literary interests; the illness and devastating death of his father.
At the core of the book, however, is the writer’s relationship with the inscrutable Elias. Elias is a Swedish student Hewitt meets while backpacking across South America after having finished his English degree at Cambridge. They begin a whirlwind romance. The bright green waterfalls and infectious reggaeton of their surroundings are as transfixing to Hewitt as Elias’s “confidence … aloofness ... easy sociability”.
