Memories of love and heartbreak during the Aids epidemic are brought vividly to life in this exhilarating, risk-taking debut

Halfway through his debut novel, Charlie Porter has a character ask the question that still haunts generations of British gay men: “What am I to do with this anger?” The book is Porter’s answer. The starting point is simple. Johnny is 19, and on the run from a small-town childhood; arriving in London, he falls in love with Jerry, who is 45 and HIV positive. Their affair coincides exactly with the last four years in which the virus was untreatable; Jerry dies of an Aids-related illness in the summer of 1995, just months before effective combination therapies began to be prescribed.

Twenty-six years later, Johnny is still living in Jerry’s flat. This is in the Nova Scotia House of the title, an oasis of public housing in one of the last pockets of unredeveloped land in London’s East End. Inevitably, a tower of flats is now being built right next to it. As the tower rises, light is gradually excluded from the garden that Jerry created and which the grief-stricken Johnny has lovingly maintained.