James Hynes is not well known in the UK – Sparrow is the 67-year-old American’s sixth novel but his first to be published internationally. It tells the story of a man who calls himself Jacob, writing in a library in Britain some time in the latter half of the fourth century AD. Jacob has been known by many names over the course of his life: Pusus (Little One), Mouse, Antinous. His secret name for himself is Sparrow. To many, he was known as cinaedus – the catamite. Jacob is, perhaps, the last Roman. He is “a weathered piece of driftwood discarded by a receding tide, the sole remaining resident of a deserted town in an abandoned province at the bleeding edge of a dying empire”.
