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“... At the beginning​ of Matthew Griffin’s novel, Wendell, his eighty-something narrator, finds his partner collapsed in their garden, face up in the North Carolina sun. Frank will recover from the immediate effects of his stroke, but the book charts his decline into physical debility and dementia, as well as Wendell’s increasingly desperate efforts to care for him ...”

“... in the oral sex in Couples (1968) or the anal sex in Rabbit Is Rich (1982) wasn’t explained.Garth Greenwell was born in 1978 and first read The Swimming-Pool Library when he was twenty (around the time Updike was reviewing The Spell). He described the ‘immense sense of permission’ it gave him: ‘There was a great liberating thrill in reading ...”

“... the way. It isn’t relevant. Her beauty fills the empty spaces in the book. What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell’s brilliantly controlled first novel, starts with a sustained exercise in the literary modelling of negative space. The unnamed narrator is an American living in Sofia who becomes involved with a hustler called Mitko – ‘hustler’ has ...”

“... that leads to much of the confusion she says she feels. (Several authors, including Sally Rooney, Garth Greenwell and Kristen Roupenian, have used BDSM to dramatise such shifting power relations in recent fiction.) In many understandings of BDSM, if all goes well, the sub has some power. After dictating their safe words and limits, they just have to do ...”

“... improvement. I don’t mind him now when he says ‘Enjoy your mail.’ * A million New Yorkers at Garth Brooks concert in Central Park. Wow. New York is where I’d live if I could. Naropa is a scam, really. They give students little soundbites of ‘classes’ every week … Allen [Ginsberg] gave the place a humour and warmth in the summer. He could chant ...”