Garner Orange

A candid portrayal of first love and self-discovery
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-0-85730-941-9
Verlag: Verve Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

A candid portrayal of first love and self-discovery, from the author of the 'instant queer classic', Isaac.

Cornwall, 2018. In the quiet fishing village of Portscatho, sixteen-year-old Daniel and seventeen-year-old Jago form an unexpected connection - something neither of them can name. What unfolds is transformative, particularly for Daniel, who for the first time feels truly seen.

East London, 2023. Daniel has rewritten himself: sharper, louder, queer in a way the city understands. But a visit from Jago stirs up a reckoning with his former life, forcing them both to question how much change their bond can withstand.

Reminiscent of Édouard Louis and Douglas Stuart's writing, Orange examines how we reconcile our past selves with the people we become, those we bring with us and those we leave behind.

'An effective exploration of how we live and experience different pressures together and apart' - Dazed (Most Anticipated Novels of 2026)

'If you're a fan of the tenderness of nuanced relationships found in Sally Rooney, you'll want to pick up a copy of Orange' - Radio Times (Best Books Released in 2026)

'One of the most emotionally resonant and beautifully written books you'll read this year, Orange is an unforgettable meditation on what it truly means to find home' - Andrew Porter, author of The Imagined Life

'A love letter to London and all its flaws and excesses... Written with the flair of Ocean Vuong and the narrative excellence of Alexander Chee... An extremely accomplished sophomore novel' - Alex Allison, author of Greatest of All Time

'Richly humane, wholly original, beautifully crafted, probing and sharply insightful' - Niamh Campbell, author of This Happy

'A beautiful and incredibly moving love story that explores queerness and identity, home and belonging, and the different people we become in different places' - Margaret McDonald, author of Glasgow Boys

'Vivid, moving and artfully observed, Orange perfectly captures the bittersweetness of leaving one home to build another' - Grace Flahive, author of Palm Meridian

'Perfectly captures the exhilaration of first love... It's hilarious, sexy and messy' - Jake Hall, author of Shoulder to Shoulder

'I devoured this... Moving and absorbing... A great exploration of modern queer life' ?????

'Wow, what a mesmerising book... Full of beautiful and vivid descriptions of both places and people' ?????

'A very worthy successor to Isaac... An extraordinary piece of writing' ?????

'Garner has a true gift and a way with words that just captivates you... I found myself wanting to live in this story forever' ?????

PRAISE FOR CURTIS GARNER

'So vivid and real, it brought a thousand memories rushing back' - Russell T Davies, writer of It's A Sin and Queer As Folk

'A wryly honest tale... It stirred bittersweet memories of wanting to astonish the world even while hating the skin I was in. Garner is clearly one to watch' - Patrick Gale, author of Mother's Boy

'An instant queer classic' - Jon Ransom, author of The Gallopers

'Garner writes like a queer twenty-first-century Richard Yates: honest, uncompromising, fearless, and completely engrossing' - Alex Pheby, author of Playthings

'The dating scenes crackle with energy' - Financial Times

'Delivered with wit, honesty and tenderness' - Attitude

'Bold and unflinching' - Telegraph

'Fast-paced, raw and emotionally intelligent'- Daily Mail

This novel contains depictions of domestic abuse, sex, and alcohol/drug use.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Garner, Curtis

Leseproben

2

Anweladow

Daniel wakes on top of his duvet, hugging a pillow to his chest. Seagulls screech outside. Over the last few days, he has taken to falling asleep without meaning to, lying on his bed and dozing off to the sight of the sea, or the sound of its breathing once hidden by darkness.

He gets up, feeling sweaty and grotty. His mother has left only a hint of her perfume behind on his bed, and he doesn’t remember stirring when she’d gone back to hers. The room smells of his own skin. His knees and elbows click like an old person’s as he goes to the window. The sun watches through a haze of condensation. Two children on the jetty lower crabbing lines into the water, a clear bucket beside them. All Daniel can see of their bounty from this distance is a green-black mass, but he imagines their claws and pearly eyes, their hard prehistoric bodies piled on top of each other.

As he turns for the bathroom he freezes, hears himself gasp.

A spider moves across the back wall, behind the head of his bed. Eratigena saeva, or giant house spider. It’s male. They move with scurrying intent, trying to mate with the more reclusive females before winter. Daniel has researched the species extensively in the hope that understanding their behaviour will make him less terrified of them. It hasn’t worked. Its leg span is easily the width of Daniel’s palm, Daniel estimates. The spider stops, as spiders do when they realise they are being watched. Daniel has been told countless times by his parents that this is a myth, but he will never be convinced. Even now, Daniel can feel the creature watching him as he watches it. His nan is so used to seeing them around the cottage that she snatches them up in her hand and tosses them out the front door, despite the fact one bit her once.

Daniel edges slowly towards the door, almost paralysed by the fear he feels.

He is certain the spider will pounce on him if he moves too suddenly.

The fear is irrational – he knows this – but the fact doesn’t make it less than fear. Nor is his fear assuaged by the words, They’re more scared of you than you are of them.

He remembers an encounter when he was six or seven years old with such clarity that there is every chance it isn’t a memory at all, but perhaps a dream he’s never forgotten and cooked into something bona fide – such is the confusion when there is no way to separate what a person has repressed and what they have feared.

In the memory, Daniel leans over the tub in the bathroom of his parents’ flat. He’s balancing his body weight on his forearms, his tiptoes only just touching the bathmat, mint-green acrylic digging into his bones. A similarly huge spider is trying and failing to climb up the side of the tub, its body a black almond, its thick, long legs coming to needle-sharp points. He remembers, vividly, being fascinated but not afraid, in the way he has since watched other young children interact with things they don’t understand. Fear, like prejudice, is learnt.

He feels a presence behind him. His father runs his fingers up and down Daniel’s back in mock-spider fashion, tickling him. Daniel laughs.

But then, his father lifts him up by his waist and tips him forward, so that Daniel’s face is inches from the spider. He is close enough to see its eyes. It darts to another corner of the bath. Daniel screams and tries to writhe out of his father’s grip.

After what feels like hours, he lifts Daniel up and returns him to solid ground. Time expands and contracts. Daniel is crying, of course, and wiping snot from his nose, but his father is laughing – not maliciously, but Daniel suspects in shock at himself, at his inability to ever seem capable of doing the right thing. Daniel knows, even at this age, that he feels immediately terrible for what he’s done. He has many memories of his father with the same theme: time catching up with him after he’s done something irresponsible, only comprehending his actions after the fact of them.

It seems to dawn on his father that no young child would ever find something like this funny.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says, and drops to his knees before Daniel, wiping his tears away and stroking his cheeks with his rough thumbs. ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. I’m sorry.’

Daniel is snivelling, but as his father pulls him close, he believes him, as he always has.

Daniel shouts for his nan, who promptly crosses the landing from her bedroom, her hair wrapped in yellow curlers.

‘Morning,’ she says with the musical whimsy of an ice-cream van. She tuts before he mentions the spider; the fact must clearly be visible in his expression or the way he is standing, as if before a firing squad.

He can’t bear to watch her touch it, nor to miss her doing so. He stands in the doorway and snatches a quick glance at the wall. It’s still not moving, steadfast, a few inches from a framed black-and-white print of Elvis, who is defying gravity on his tiptoes, his right arm thrown up in the air and his left out in front of him.

Daniel retreats onto the landing as she grabs it. He can hear the screech of the latch on the window as she unfastens and opens it, throwing the spider into the front garden below, where it will die. This species is born in your house and rarely knows how to survive outside.

His nan gives him a small smile of endearment or pity, or both. She smooths down her dressing gown in her matronly, resolute way and returns to her bedroom. Daniel thinks she looks like Virginia Woolf in profile: she has a long face and nose, large eyes and a little pouty mouth.

‘You can go and get some milk,’ he hears her say as she closes the door. ‘If you want to return the favour.’

He dresses. As he is about to leave, his mother calls his name from the bathroom. A rug of steam creeps under the door, and he hears water pouring into the tub. He opens the door and finds her sitting on the closed lid of the toilet, her long hair up in a pink scrunchie, which makes her look like a teenager. In the tub, lavender-scented bubbles expand and replicate into silvery hillocks.

‘Are you OK?’ she asks, running her palm up and down her calf as if she’s been on her feet all day. She smiles at him weakly. Soberly. This is the look he most associates with his mother. Beneath her loud belligerence, she is tired and afraid.

He nods. ‘Are you?’

‘I’m sorry for always rowing with your nan. You know we don’t mean it.’

‘It’s fine.’

She holds her hand out to him and he takes it. He leans down and hugs her, and she exhales into his shoulders, exasperated by herself, or experiencing the fresh daily relief that her only son has woken up another morning without hating her.

It’s confusing having a mother with a drinking problem. Daniel tends to feel ambivalent about it. He can no longer understand why his nan or his teachers at school had worried so much. Yes, she cries all the time. Yes, as a child he’d gotten used to walking to the corner shop with her at ten o’clock at night, standing in the street as she hammered on the door because she’d arrived two minutes after it had closed. But his mother has never been cruel to him. It mainly bores him, her drinking. Her endless soliloquies about how she’d brought him into the world, how he’d weighed exactly nine pounds and had had a full head of black hair, how much he’d cried when he had colic, how he’d walked at eight months. How he’d saved her, despite the fact he hadn’t asked to be born – saving someone who did not want to be saved.

Mummy’s little prince, his father had used to say, his voice gravelly with jealousy when Daniel had hurt himself and gone crying into her arms.

‘I know you must be missing your dad, but we’ll work it all out.’

Daniel says nothing. He doesn’t miss his father at all. In fact, he’s enjoying their being away from him.

His mother turns off the tap. He thinks this punctuates the end of the conversation and goes to leave, but she adds, ‘It’s not going to be forever.’

Daniel wants to say that geography makes little difference to the way he sees his family. He loves his parents, but he can’t help feeling displaced, wrapped up in and also exhausted by the pain they’ve spent years inflicting upon each other. They’ve spent his whole life separating and getting back together; it had become like smoking or his mother’s drinking – a habit, rather than an actual desire to be apart. They revel in destroying each other but are also each other’s props, like two plants intertwining their vines until both strangle each other to death. One day, Daniel hopes, his parents will realise their obsession with each other is not love.

Daniel walks to the village’s only shop, pausing to look at the boats on their sides in the sand awaiting the return of the tide....