As Luck Would Have It: Vintage Classics

A “vivid and peculiar” novel about a reserved young gay man’s coming-of-age in 1950s London, “like a starched shirt covering a murmuring heart.” (Kate Kellaway, The Observer)

Shortly after he arrives in London, and without any other friend in the city, Richard—an orphan who was raised in a group home—agrees to share a flat with Chuck. Where Richard is shy and cautious, secretly yearning to love and be loved, Chuck is larger than life; an ebullient, high-camp leather queen who calls himself “Auntie Zee” and spirals into jealous rages. He doesn’t like sharing Richard with anyone else, especially not George, the handsome and rather mysterious Scot with whom the younger man begins a relationship.

Set in the bohemian, bedsitter world of South Kensington in the 1950s, the drab details of which are beautifully evoked, but “governed by the impeccable prosiness of a vivid dream” (James Merrill), Samuel Lock’s Sagittarius Prize-winning first novel—which was published when he was seventy—won widespread acclaim as a true original. As the novelist Ian Samson predicted, it was “destined for cult status”: both “a one-off” and “one-of-a-kind.”