At 47, Mr. F?s working life on London?s Skin Lane is one governed by calm, precision and routine. So when he starts to have frightening, recurring nightmares, he does his best to ignore them. The images that appear in his dream are disturbing ? Mr. F can't for the life of him think where they have come from. After all, he's a perfectly ordinary middle-aged man. As London?s crooked backstreets begin to swelter in the long, hot summer of 1967, Mr. F?s nightmare becomes an obsession. A chance encounter adds a face to the body that nightly haunts him, and the torments of his sweat-drenched nights lead him ? and the reader ? deeper into a terrifying labyrinth of rage, desire and shame. Part fairy-tale, part compelling evocation of a now-lost London, Neil Bartlett's critically-acclaimed third novel is his fiercest piece of writing yet: cruel, erotic, and tender.

Prizes

Short-listed for Costa Novel Award 2007

With Skin Lane, Bartlett further demonstrates his skills as a creative polymath of the highest order. * Dazed & Confused *
Affectionately evoked... always apt and precise... Skin Lane grips with real force * TLS *
Skin Lane welds itself to your hands from first to last. Textured, teeming with menace and, at the end, deeply moving, it is an extremely fine piece of writing. * The Times *
Original, disturbing and... beautifully written, this is an always fascinating work. * Literary Review *
A potent fable about the destructive power of lust and an unsettling psychological study in the manner of Patricia Highsmith. * Daily Telegraph *
Skin Lane is a fiendishly taut little psycho-shocker that recalls Simenon at his most hardboiled and Highsmith at her creepiest. -- Will Self
A powerful and complex story of sexual obsession... a raw, dark, highly dramatic narrative ... a profoundly original meditation on thwarted desire * Patrick McGrath *
I read Skin Lane with one eye closed out of sheer animal terror. Then, unimaginably, it brought me to tears; what a work of art -- so unexpected and heartbreaking and lovely -- Armistead Maupin
Brilliantly eerie... constantly surprising... captures vividly the atmosphere of the changing London of the 60s... But it's in his depiction of a specific kind of helpless and fearful love that Bartlett excels. * Guardian *
In hushed, confident prose, Bartlett has created a vivid tale of sexual obsession * Time Out *

Born in 1958, Neil Bartlett has spent twenty-five years at the cutting edge of British gay culture. His ground-breaking study of Oscar Wilde, Who Was That Man? paved the way for a queer re-imagining of history ; his first novel, Ready To Catch Him Should He Fall, was voted Capital Gay Book of The Year; his second, Mr Clive and Mr Page, was nominated for the Whitbread Prize. Both have since been translated into five European languages. Listing him as one of the country's fifty most significant gay cultural figures, the Independent said "Brilliant,beautiful, mischievous; few men can match Bartlett for the breadth of his exploration of gay sensibility". He also works as a director, and in 2000 was awarded an OBE for services to the theatre.