TWO LOVERS is a bold, erotic and searchingly honest novel about a young man's coming-of-age, from his rural small town life after university, where his older brother is spiralling into psychosis following a divorce, via Paris and Seville and London, over the course of two intense love affairs which change him forever - one with a woman, the other with a man.
Our unnamed narrator feels lost, confused and full of longing, in the way that young people making their first tentative forays into the world tend to be, but he is also remarkably perceptive, thoughtful and articulate. He falls deeply for Valentina, a woman almost ten years older than him, in Paris, and through her he meets Lyle, an ex-boyfriend of hers who is, by his own account, 'sexually ambiguous'. We follow first his loving, tumultuous and all-consuming relationship with Valentina, and then, two years since they bumped into Lyle in the Tuileries, he crosses paths with Lyle again and experiences an equally consuming relationship with him, albeit one of a much shorter duration.
While the two affairs are different in circumstance and nature, each is treated with the same importance in the novel - and this is just one of the ways TWO LOVERS is unique. There are shades of Baldwin and Rhys here, and also Cusk, but this novel can only have been written by Ralf Webb - with a poet's eye and ear, and a true and brilliant mind and heart.
PRAISE FOR RALF WEBB:
'An important voice in British poetry' Eley Williams, author of The Liar's Dictionary
'Webb's writing is of a quality rarely seen' Diarmuid Hester, author of Nothing Ever Just Disappears
'True poet-scholars, whose creative and critical concerns intimately connect, are rare indeed: Webb is slowly and carefully establishing an interesting niche for himself among rather distinguished company. He's a writer who can give expression to crisis and confusion, but who can also offer careful analysis and critique of the causes and consequences of our human pain' Telegraph
