"A fascinating working-class queer literary voice."
–Lucy Scholes, Financial Times
"Hyatt suggests that sexuality of any kind is a longing for relation and a way of knowing the self. But so is writing, so is poetry, and so is any kind of social activity. For Hyatt, queer sexuality is a given, not, to adopt the language of the day, a 'social problem.' And in the bohemian enclaves of early 1960s London, he found a context in which his queerness–which along with his race and class sometimes rendered him precarious–could be nurtured and protected."–
David Grundy, Harriet Books "This is the imagination of the margins, which makes it all the more resilient and remarkable, sustained despite disregard and contempt from mainstream society. Read today, when our world seems to be sliding frighteningly closer to the one Hyatt was writing from, his work provides a kind of solace."
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Thomas Wee, Cleveland Review of Books "[A] feverish, persistent voice."
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Oluwaseun Olayiwola, TLS "Acerbic yet wistful, indecent, caffeinated, raw, suddenly profound - a hip flask of a novel, brimful of phenomenal lines."
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Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of Gay Bar "[Hyatt's] story is incredible, his poetry - standing aside from his biography, but as ever and not, informed by it - is so contemporary, so hilarious, so stark, it is hard to believe he was writing in the 60s. . . I could quote him endlessly, and I am grateful to the editors for bringing these poems properly into print."
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Rachael Allen, Granta "This novel deserves a place alongside John Rechy's City of Night and Frank O'Hara's "In Memory of My Feelings" in the great queer literature of self-realization, where beauty is found on the outskirts and in the after hours, when almost everyone else has nodded off or stopped listening. Like some latter-day saint, Leda skirts the edge of queer and working-class London life in the 1960s, looking for beauty and love, searching for grace, and, of course, a few pounds and a decent place to sleep. But such insecurity and insignificance is as close to godliness as one can get in post-war England. Exalt the losers, for it is they who carry the world on their hard-done backs."
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Andrew Durbin "Depressing, hopeful, witty and truly a work of art. . . Love, Leda is an intensely introspective, deep dive into the gay scene of 1960s London. Captivating in its singularity, this book showcases human loneliness as our most shared experience."
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Kahill Perkins, Raven Book Store (Lawrence, KS)
"2023 has been the year of Mark Hyatt: the posthumous publication of Love, Leda (Peninsula) and So Much for Life (eds. Sam Larkin & Luke Roberts, Nightboat) have changed UK and queer literature forever."
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So Mayer, Lunate
"In this amazing novel, Mark Hyatt records with wonder the excited anguish of the very young. His tale of unrequited love, loneliness of the flesh, and life on the margins owes something to the curdled realism of mid-century England, and something to the existential riffing of the Nouveau Roman. Hyatt writes without prudery–his sex scenes are startling in their immediacy. In the end,
Love, Leda is a poet's novel with its far-flung lyricism and its surprises of precision and revelation."
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Robert Glück, author of Margery Kempe "Love, Leda is a transgressive, wriggling slice of queer, working class life in 1960s London. Hyatt is an important literary parent to everyone writing queer London, dreaming of lives free of drudgery and asking what the point of living is."
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Yara Rodrigues Fowler, author of there are more things "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. With an intensity of life-in-motion, a lyric of spirit and survival in pursuit of the existential, Hyatt vividly conjures his protagonist's navigation of an era's incipient edges. An absorbing, melancholy odyssey of love both transactional and yearned-for, the publication of Love, Leda honours a unique literary voice rediscovered."
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Peter Scalpello, author of Limbic
