Radical Love
- Author Neil Blackmore
- Narrator Anthony Howell
- Publisher Cornerstone
- Publish Date 1 January 1970
- Run Time 10 hours and 23 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Historical fiction, Historical romance, Modern and contemporary fiction.
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What to expect
Brought to you by Penguin.
Welcome to England, 1809. London is a violent, intolerant city, exhausted by years of war, beset by soaring prices and political tensions. By day, John Church preaches on the radical possibilities of love to a multicultural, working-class congregation in Southwark. But by night, he crosses the river to the secret and glamorous world of a gay molly house on Vere Street, where ordinary men reinvent themselves as funny, flirtatious drag queens and rent boys cavort with labourers and princes alike. There, Church becomes the first minister to offer marriages between men, at enormous risk.
Everything changes when Church meets the unworldly and free-thinking Ned, part of a group of African activist abolitionists who attend his chapel. The two bond over their broken childhoods, and Church falls obsessively in love with Ned's tender nature. In a fragile, colourful secret world under threat, Church's love for Ned takes him to the edge of reason.
Based on the incredible true story of one of the most important events in queer history, Radical Love is a sensuous and prescient story about gender and sexuality, and how the most vulnerable survive in dangerous times.
©2023 Neil Blackmore (P)2023 Penguin Audio
Critics Review
Neil Blackmore re-imagines an astounding story of gay men in London 200 years ago and under the pain of their betrayal and injustice, he uncovers loyalty and above all, love. I relished every page.
Blackmore has taken the historical facts and created an imaginative, layered, clever story that explores male desire in an intolerant time. With wit and aplomb he performed a similar trick in The Dangerous Kingdom of Love, riffing on the gay life of the polymath Francis Bacon. Radical Love confirms Blackmore as being one of the most original voices in historical fiction today.
I was staggered by this book; one of the boldest novelistic explorations of desire I have read in some time. Frighteningly prescient, it shines a light on the world-making possibilities of erotic transgression and the violence that so often comes in its wake.
Forget Bridgerton. Neil Blackmore’s Radical Love give us the people of Regency England and its people as they really were; brutally intolerant, scarred by slavery, marred by oppression and social injustice. Don’t look for heroes here – look for life as it’s really lived, people as they really are.
A celebration of the erotic lives of long-dead gay Londoners and a lament for past persecutions, Radical Love is a powerful story of desire flourishing amid danger.
Radical Love is both a searing portrayal of love and obsession, and breathtaking in its depiction of the brutality and hypocrisy of prejudice, all told in sharp, beautiful prose. An unforgettable book.
Utterly compelling. So beautifully written, so many twists and turns and achingly sad moments where I gasped aloud. I haven’t read a novel that’s tugged at my heartstrings as much as this since John Boyne’s The Heart’s Invisible Furies. A must-read … I’ll be thinking about it for a long time to come.
A page-turner
Full of urgent questions about individual and collective freedoms, and the writing of history…Compellingly real.
A tale of courage and survival, richly imagined and full of pitch-perfect period detail and sly wit.
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