Inkandescent to publish Bartlett's latest

Indie publisher Inkandescent will publish Address Book by Neil Bartlett, a collection of seven stories spanning three centuries.

From a new millennium civil partnership celebration to profane love in a Victorian tenement, from a council-flat bedroom at the height of the AIDS crisis to a doctor’s living-room in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the stories will lead readers through decades of change to discover hope in the strangest of places, says the publisher. 

Address Book will be published in October 2021. 

Editor Nathan Evans said: "I’ve loved Neil’s writing ever since finding his first book in the university library, so to be publishing his latest is something of a dream for me. Inkandescent are proud to be printing such an important queer writer with so much to say about where we are and how we got here."

Bartlett commented: "Every place that I’ve ever slept in, I’ve always wondered about what went on at that address before I moved in. To write this book, I went back to some significant places in my own life and let the walls talk to me. The result of that listening is this new set of stories."

Bartlett is the author of plays, adaptations, translations and novels. His debut, Ready To Catch Him Should He Fall, was published by Serpent's Tail in 1990 and was Capital Gay’s Book of the Year.