Description

Chosen as a Best Book of 2025 by Cosmopolitan, Stylist, Elle, Dazed, Vogue, AnOther and GQ ‘One of the UKs most perceptive young novelists with her finger firmly on the pulse of contemporary behaviour’ Guardian’Riveting, funny and devastating’ Shon FayeMax is thirty, a published poet and grossly overpaid legal counsel for a tech company. Shes living her best life! Or is she? The debris of years of dysphoria and failed relationships rattle around in her head. When she tumbles down the stairs at a New Years Eve party and wakes up in hospital alone, she decides to make some changes. First things first: a stab at good old-fashioned heteronormativity.Enter Vincent, corporate lawyer and hobby baker. His trad friendship group may as well speak a different language to Max, and his Chinese parents never pictured their son dating a trans woman. Its uncertain terrain, but Vincent cares for Max in a way shed long given up on as a foolish fantasy.Yet Vincent is carrying his own baggage. On his gap year in Thailand a decade prior, he vies for the attention of a gorgeous traveller, Alex, with secrets of her own. Is Vincent really the new face of the Enlightened Man, or will the ghosts of his past sabotage his and Maxs happiness?