Now there’s no you, eventually there’ll be no me, but everything that has happened between us is how we have come to know ourselves. We first meet the young, red-haired, green-eyed narrator, who has inherited their love of words, like their tendency towards depression, from their mother, in London.

His relationship to his queerness and his fundamental homophobia and conservative values are unearthed, begging the question of who he might have become.

There’s lots of things about this book that I loved… the locations, the references to places in London now long gone that I also used to know and love, the pace of life in both London and NYC that vividly reminded me of my own 20s - living in London, but spending a lot of time across the Atlantic. It’s like that sad scene in ‘The Blue Angel’ where the once-dignified Emil Jennings serves Marlene Dietrich as her handmaid, testing the temperature of her curling tongs on the pages of a wall calendar. e. the bedroom] by dragging another piece of plywood over the abyss, like the rock rolled over Christ's tomb' - this is personal taste but I'd have pencilled through all those clumsy similes, as well as the gratuitous and rather tasteless Holocaust reference. And, of course, maybe that was the point: this is, after all, a story Bibby is narrating and better for it to be about her than the two basic cis men in her life, but I think with them never feeling quite real, it impacted the realness of Bibby too.

Their descriptions of love, identity, trauma, sex and death are deeply graphic, tragic and yet tender, and will resonate with any reader.In a story about a dead man, everyone becomes a ghost, and the title of the book does reflect its self-conscious ephemerality.

It is now ten years since we met, six years since we last spoke, four years since your death, and I’m writing you this from Mexico City, under grave obligation.

This epic, but immensely personal, eulogy for their lost but haunting lover is not quite like anything I have ever read. Stylistic niggles aside, though, this is a hip and cool take on the lost love narrative - and what a great cover! In every practical sense I am the same person I was before reading this, but in all the important ways I am newer, wiser, more afraid, and more resolute. As it turns out, a pharmacy’s digital date, time, and temperature clock provides the answer: the narrator realizes that it’s February 29th. I hesitate to say ‘characters’ there, both because I am uncertain how much this work toes the line of biographical, but also because they seemed so honestly real to me.

Her prose is tender and lyrical, yet also raw and unflinching as it jumps between love and pain, living and grieving, memory and the fleeting nature of time. There was no narrative drive to speak of - the story just seemed an interminable stream of pages with no ebb or flow or discernible structure - and the central axis (that two people who had no common ground whatsoever but some kind of intoxicating sexual chemistry in a brief open relationship for a couple of months) had no believability whatsoever. The writing is gloriously unabashed, skimming effortlessly from the esoteric to the ribald, from the poetic to the pragmatic, though you kind of have also accept it’s as extra as fuck.My days are long past of days I’d be found in bar in San Francisco to a packed house of filled with ‘dress-to-kill’ people….