It hits the mark much more often than it misses and some of those misses would be fixed by a time machine back to mid-sixties London, but in some ways, the book is a time machine back to mid-sixties London. In one such episode, he picks up a guy on the Bayswater Road who takes him to an alleyway and roughs him up a bit, but it is unclear whether the violence is part of the sexual act, and indeed whether it is wanted by Leda, who walks away wounded but not entirely dissatisfied.

In his pursuit of the bohemian, Leda leads a nocturnal life of smoky bars, jazz clubs, and the odd dalliance with a woman.I think I’ll make my way back to town and spend the night in a coffee bar listening to the juke-box. Although declaring himself open to experience, this doesn’t appear to include the experience of work.

But I found the narrator's increasingly melodramatic self-reflection so exasperating and his pursuit of a straight man, which accelerates his self-loathing to the point of a suicide attempt, so pointless.The novel has no chapters (although does feature breaks), and Luke Roberts who wrote the ‘Note on the text and the author’ – found at the back of the book – explains that he resisted the urge to insert chapters, instead allowing Hyatt’s writing style to showcase the blurring of his days.

I am a ghost, drifting around people, looking at their bodies and watching them in their religious acts. We read literary fiction, non-fiction, classics and children’s books, all genres and styles embraced in our aim to share the love. But beneath that it is a treatise on dissatisfaction, although not with anything in particular; rather, it is a one man’s inner struggle to find purpose, if you like, but it is also a man’s – sometimes guilty – sense that nothing could make him happy and that even if it could, he does not deserve it. Love, Leda is a short novel by Mark Hyatt (1940 -1972), published posthumously in 2023, having been unearthed some 51 years after the author’s death. He pushes the button and a loud riff sound, like jazz comes bellowing out from all sides of this two-roomed flat.Love, Leda’ follows our misanthropic eponymous lead skirt the streets of Soho, borrowing money off friends, random hookups and traipsing around London with no purpose or goal. His sexuality, too, is less than linear: occasional, functional liaisons with women likely having a touch of autobiography, if Hyatt’s own life is an indicator. The style and setting reminded me a lot of The Lonely Londoners - just a snapshot of a bit of life that is so different yet so much the same. An unearthed treasure of its time, Mark Hyatt’s compelling and emotive novel Love, Leda recounts a whirlwind of intimacies and embodiment, philosophy and humour, in a daring depiction of queer desire, impulse and need, laced through a context of disconnection. This article is taken from The Big Issue magazine, which exists to give homeless, long-term unemployed and marginalised people the opportunity to earn an income.

Em vida, Hyatt apareceu em antologias, revistas literárias marginais, não canônicas, e publicou dois livros artesanais (chapbooks, similares aos livros mimeografados da poesia marginal brasileira dos anos 70) de poesia no início da década 70. If you loved Catcher in the Rye, The Bell Jar or Everything I Know About Love, you’ll love this book too. I aspire to nothing because I exist, and the study of religion is like the study of the dreams I never had. And then there is Daniel, a buttoned-up man of the Lord, for whom Leda nurses an unrequited obsession - one which sends him spiraling into self-destruction. Though Mark Hyatt actively brought out poetry in the English bohemian scene of the 1960s, his novel “Love, Leda” has only been published posthumously this year.

Because their guilt and self-pity is a sickness inbred in them, draining them; so they have to numb themselves with hollow sexuality and the din of the jukebox; inflate their shallow little egos into seeing themselves as supreme men of tomorrow, which they’ll never be. I am without an address so I sit on the floor out of sheer tiredness and join them (the learned ones). Further satisfaction is found in the passages of dialogue – urbane rallies of quick wit, indicating Hyatt had unfulfilled designs on the theatre – and Love, Leda’s portrayal of a stratum of 1960s London that both stands apart from the picture-postcard Carnaby Street image and, in a way, helped bring that into existence. And then there is Daniel, a buttoned-up man of the Lord, for whom Leda nurses an unrequited obsession – one which sends him spiralling into self-destruction. Love, Leda offers an interesting and mostly un-seen snapshot of this time in history for queer people, told through a working-class lens.