J.B. Priestley

Gothic fiction is full of Jekylls and Hydes. For every castle, there is a dungeon; for every locked door, a hidden chamber; and for every repressed secret, there is a ghost who won’t keep quiet. In his Booker--shortlisted novel The Disappearers, Marlon James brings the Gothic to Jamaica. Built on the outcrop of a vast underwater mountain range, at the depths of which are some of the most hostile conditions on earth, it is a place where being gay is also a matter of survival. If countries have basements, then Jamaica’s goes a long way down. In an abandoned house in Kingston at the height of the 1980s Aids crisis, eight queer men meet to rehearse John Herbert’s gay prison play, Fortune and Men’s Eyes.

A prospective reader who chanced upon Recommended! without its subtitle might be forgiven for thinking that the six grim-looking portraits on the cover depict the Watch Committee of an exceptionally puritanical interwar-era seaside town. This would be a misjudgment, as, rather than being charged with censoring films or evicting courting couples from cinema back rows, Nicola Wilson’s galère – Hugh Walpole, Clemence Dane, George Gordon, Edmund Blunden, Sylvia Lynd and J.B. Priestley – turn out to have made up the selection panel of the early 1930s Book Society. The subtitle is, of course, a wild exaggeration. Even at its high-water mark, the Society’s membership was in the low five figures.