First published 2023
Juan Gay spends his final days at The Palace, a crumbling desert institution that once served as an asylum. A young man cares for him there, someone Juan met only briefly but who has lingered in his thoughts ever since. As death approaches, the two men share stories of lost loves and family, their personal histories merging with larger tales of suffering and persecution. The young caretaker sorts through Juan's possessions and finds a copy of Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns with pages blacked out and censored. Reading through this damaged manuscript, he learns about Jan Gay, a queer anthropologist whose radical research was suppressed by the very committee she worked with. The novel weaves together memory and silence, combining historical documents, screenplays, and testimony to examine how stories get told and untold.
Genres: fiction, historical-fiction, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: The Palace
Period: Final Days
320 pages · Hardcover · Granta
Content warnings: homophobia