Love, Leda - Paperback

by Mark Hyatt (Author)

Newly discovered in the author's archives and published for the first time in the UK in 2023, this portrait of queer, working class London drifts from coffee shop to house party, in search of the next tryst.

Leda is lost. He spends his days steeped in ennui, watching the hours pass, waiting for the night to arrive. Trysts in the rubble of a bombsite follow hours spent in bed with near strangers, as Leda seeks out intimacy in unlikely places. Semi-homeless and estranged from his family of origin, he relies on the support of his chosen one: a community of older gay men and divorced women who feed and clothe him, gently encouraging him to find a foothold in a society which excludes him at every turn. And then there is Daniel, a buttoned-up man of the Lord, for whom Leda nurses an unrequited obsession--one which sends him spiraling into self-destruction. Pre-dating the British Sexual Offences Act of 1967, Love Leda was first published in 2023 in the UK. This long lost novel is a portrait of London's Soho that is now lost, an important document of queer working-class life from a voice long overlooked.

Author Biography

Mark Hyatt was born in South London in 1940. In recent years, there has been renewed attention to Hyatt's work. His appearance in the influential anthology Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain (1969) led to a growing reputation among the poets of the so-called British Poetry Revival. Hyatt killed himself in 1972, leaving behind almost 2000 pages of manuscript material. In the years following his death, his work was published in three chapbooks and circulated among a small but devoted group of readers. His was posthumously included in the ground-breaking Not Love Alone: A Modern Gay Anthology (1985). His only known novel, Love, Leda (Peninsula Press 2023, Nightboat Books 2024) is considered an important document of queer, working-class life and a portrait of 1960s Soho in London. So Much For Life, a collection of Hyatt's poems coedited by Luke Roberts and Sam Ladkin, was published by Nightboat Books in 2023.