Address Book

LONGLISTED FOR THE POLARI PRIZE 2022

‘Gay love and desire, past and present, has never been so beautifully articulated as in Neil Bartlett’s Address Book. He takes us into the homes and minds of a handful of strangers and then—in prose full of gentle foreboding—slowly peels away the layers until their truths are revealed. Defiant, potent—and ultimately uplifting.’
JULIAN CLARY

Address Book is the new work of fiction by the Costa-shortlisted author of "Skin Lane". Neil Bartlett’s cycle of stories takes us to seven very different times and situations: from a new millennium civil partnership celebration to erotic obsession 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. They lead us through decades of change to discover hope in the strangest of places.

‘Bartlett is a pioneer on and off the page and we are lucky to have him telling our stories’
—DAMIAN BARR​

‘One of England’s finest writers’
—EDMUND WHITE




Neil Bartlett was born in 1958. He grew up in Chichester, West Sussex, and now lives in Worthing and London with his partner of thirty-one years, author and archivist James Gardiner.
He is the author of novels "Mr. Clive and Mr. Page" (1996), shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award, and published in the US under the title "The House on Brooke Street; Ready To Catch Him Should He Fall" (1990); and "Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde" (1988), a ground-breaking study which places Oscar Wilde in a wider gay historical and cultural context. This book won the Capital Gay Book of the Year Award. His most recent novels are "Skin Lane" (2007), shortlisted for the 2007 Costa Novel Award, and "The Disappearance Boy" (2014). He has also written several short stories.