Patrick Carey

He's, I would say, in his late 30s, early 40s.

And his first book came out in 2016 to a great deal of acclaim.

That's called What Belongs to You.

And I must admit, when I first heard about this book, I approached it with a little bit of trepidation, and I'll tell you why.

The plot of it is one that a lot of people, especially people that have read a lot of queer fiction, have heard before.

It's a young Anglophone, in this case American man, going to a European city, in this case Sofia in Bulgaria, where he falls in love with a young local.

The local inevitably is more vulnerable economically and socially than he is and he sort of discovers himself through that experience and it kind of ends and...

It's just a story that we've heard many, many times over, all the way back to James Baldwin in Giovanni's Room, Alan Hollinghurst in The Folding Star.

So I must say I was a bit like, oh God, another one of these.

But when I opened the book and started reading his writing, any sense of trepidation completely melted into nothing because he...

He is, I reckon, and I'm saying it now, maybe the best living writer working at the moment.

Well, maybe not.

No, I'll take that back.

Oh, go on.

I mean, he's certainly up there with the best working writers at the moment, in English at least.

His writing is simple.

It's extremely emotionally precise to a point where it feels sometimes like your brain has written it yourself.

I mean, I do identify deeply with his protagonists.

He is an ex-poet before becoming a prose writer, so the imagery is beautiful.

But he's just so totally in command of his craft.