Lie With Me: 'Stunning and heart-gripping' André Aciman

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He says: Because you are not like all the others, because I don’t see anyone but you and you don’t even realize it. Simmering with menace, and with a blisteringly taut and twisted plot. Simply superb." - Sarah Hilary, author of Someone Else's Skin

The rain continues to pound against the roof of the shed. We are alone in the world. I’ve never enjoyed the rain so much. We took refuge in my parents’ camper, which was parked in our garage for the winter at the end of the season. (At the beginning of spring it will be found in the Saint-Georges-de-Didonne campground, where we spend weekends walking on the beach, buying churros at the waterfront and fresh shrimp at the market that will end up in bowls later when it’s time for drinks before dinner.)On reflection, maybe that’s all a bit harsh. I suppose Paul does have some redeeming qualities, as do his friends. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s start with the plot of Sabine Durrant’s utterly engrossing psychological thriller. I discovered the cinema four years earlier when we first moved to Barbezieux from the village where we lived above the school with the linden trees. It was a small theater, with only a few seats, but to a child from the village, a boy who had to go to bed at eight thirty every night regardless of his pleas and ploys, a boy who had never in his life seen a film before, it was a new world. Later I will write about this longing, the intolerable deprivation of the other. I will write about the sadness that eats away at you, making you crazy. It will become the template for my books, in spite of myself. I wonder sometimes if I have ever written of anything else. It’s as if I never recovered from it: the inaccessible other, occupying all my thoughts. In spare yet evocative prose, elegantly translated by Molly Ringwald, Philippe Besson relates the erotic awakening of two adolescent boys in a small French town in the 1980s. Lie With Me captures their world with the grainy poignancy of an old high school yearbook, while movingly conveying the quintessential human dramas of longing, love, and letting go. Caroline Weber, author of 'Proust's Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-siècle Paris' He lives on a farm. His parents are farmers who own a little plot of land. They are modest people who sell the product of their vineyard to cognac distilleries. He corrects himself: Actually the vineyard is just a row of vines surrounded by low walls.

His mother’s family still lives in Vilalba. The brothers married and have kids. All the kids have cousins who live within a mile. The reunions are always joyous and the goodbyes bittersweet, everyone regretting they have so little time together. Thomas says that he doesn’t know Vilalba very well because they usually just stay at the house for endless conversations, punctuated by laughter and complaints, long lunches and drawn-out dinners. He says that for him Spain is just people in his family who love one another, who eat and drink and cut each other off in conversation until night falls. As the day ends, I am the amusing child in the tub with his bare feet and legs, stamping on the grapes to crush the skins. It’s the end of the season, and everyone gathers around a long table. People are speaking loudly, drinking, laughing, playing the guitar, for the last time before the Spaniards leave to return the following autumn, or possibly never. For me the separation is heartbreaking. Later I sit in the distillery in front of the stills and copper pipes, waiting for the smoke to escape. It’s called “the angel’s share.” I am the child who is waiting for the share of the angels. My father was amused to have his son participate in this ritual, but he had already repeated many times over that he didn’t want this life for me. No land or field work, no manual labor. It was out of the question for him that I should be a member of the working class.You can tell from the clothes, the high-waisted ultra-skinny acid-wash jeans, the patterned sweaters. Some of the girls wear woolen leggings in different colors that pool around their ankles. Moving ... Besson's writing and Ringwald's smooth translation provide emotional impact. Publishers Weekly

I try to figure out the part that chance played, to assess the nature of the risk that led to the encounter, but I don’t succeed. We are in the land of the unthinkable. (Later he will tell me that he waited for the right moment to approach me but until that morning it had never arisen.) It’s jeans that we unbutton. I discover his sex, veiny, white, sumptuous. I am enthralled by his sex. It will take many years and many lovers before I ever return to this sense of amazement.

And as for the rare seconds scraped together on the playground, or in the hallway, when we’re finally in the same place: total indifference. Worse than coldness. An attentive observer might even discern a certain hostility, a determination to keep his distance. It has been years since anything moved me as much as Lie With Me. It will become a classic Jonathan Coe, bestselling author of 'Middle England' It’s at the end of the town. I’m surprised by the choice of the place, since it’s not at all central, or easily accessible. I think: He must like places away from the crowd. I do not yet understand that he obviously chose it to be out of sight. I am in this state of innocence, this stupidity. If I were used to exercising caution, or had developed the art of not responding to questions—but I barely know anything yet of concealment, of the clandestine.