The Disappearers takes as its starting point a 1988 clandestine theatre group, a rather disparate selection of local gay men who answered the coded call to audition for a production of Canadian playwright John Herbert's prison-set drama, Fortune and Men's Eyes, directed by the veteran Cambridge-educated Havelock Titus. Its first section is narrated by the white-passing Belgian-Jamaican youth Eddy Porteous, who has (compared at least to his peers) a relatively straightforward home life, and sits kind of on the periphery of the group, some of whom have prior connections and are at least generally more immersed in the real-world realities of living as a gay man in Jamaica. He develops a fascination with the beautiful half-Chinese Mat Chin, and begins to notice the difficulties experienced by another fellow actor, Jordan Brown. By a quirk of fate, Porteous misses the rehearsal on the night when it is overrun by a bloodthirsty homophobic mob, inspired by (and ring-led by) the local dancehall artist Streggeh Don, whose hate-filled hit ‘Batty is not Pussy’ has become something of an anthem for many of the worst elements of Jamaican society.

Nova Scotia House is told in the unique interior voice of Johnny Grant, who as a 19-year-old in the 1980s met and fell in love with Jerry Field, a 45-year-old who was HIV positive at a time when that meant a guaranteed and imminent death sentence. It’s narrated from some 30 years hence, as Johnny struggles to negotiate the modern world without Jerry (now long dead) and without much of the exuberance and idealism that characterised their time together.

Fast By The Horns is set in the Bristol neighbourhood of St. Pauls in 1980. It focuses on Jabari, the 14-year-old only son of the Rasafarian community leader Ras Levi. He exists in a clearly very close-knit community, but one that is constantly beaten down by corrupt policing and lack of council investment. Ras Levi and his fellow Rastafarians in the community, including of course Jabari, dream of repatriation to the Ethiopian motherland, though others in the community mock their ambitions and urge them to engage with the political realities of life in the UK. Amidst the violence and daily struggles with police brutality, Jabari's encounter with a young girl formerly from St. Pauls, who we find has been placed in the care of a white family in a neighbouring affluent area, provides a tender and emotional thread at the centre of the novel.