Its protagonist Leda is regularly amusing and razor sharp, but not necessarily always likeable - he is at times rude and arrogant, living with no fixed address and floating between benefactors.

At times, love Leda is not an easy read, with no chapter structure and long paragraphs which blur into an unevenly paced timeline. 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.One leans against the wall, keeping his arse well gathered in, so that his covered penis catches the point of everyone’s view. 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. At best it is a source of pleasure, excitement, transgression; sometimes it is merely a curious character trait, a peccadillo. I aspire to nothing because I exist, and the study of religion is like the study of the dreams I never had.

Thus, as a chronicle of what life was like in bohemian '60's Soho London, and its glimpse into the life of an unapologetic and unashamed bisexual, lends it far greater significance than it might otherwise merit on purely literary grounds.If you loved Catcher in the Rye, The Bell Jar or Everything I Know About Love, you’ll love this book too. 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. Leda’s sexual encounters tend to be triggered by a wink in a bar, a not-so-casual glance in a public lavatory. I rush in and out of the cars in the Strand, trying to make up for a friendship I had forgotten which is eating me.

Other gays are neither radical heroes nor the pathetic, self-hating fairies of, say, Mart Crowley’s Boys in the Band. The book's eponymous hero Leda has no fixed abode and bounces between male and female lovers while earning a bit of cash from low paid jobs in metal work and kitchens. No-one, I think, will read this and believe that it’s a lost literary masterpiece but what is certainly indisputable is that it captures an important social moment and provides a frank and unflinching portrait of gay life in the years immediately before partial legalisation. Make yourself at home, but close the door if you go out,’ he says quietly, and closes the door on himself.Mark Hyatt is largely remembered, if he’s remembered at all, as a minor poet who lived on the fringes of the bohemian set in London of the 60s. Usually a frequenter of the hip coffee bar scene of that era, here Leda takes him to a Lyon’s Corner House and propositions him over a cup of appropriately bittersweet coffee.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.He is often caught up in feeling which he cannot control and sex is viewed often as a way to inflict pain on himself as much as it is a release or a way of sharing intimacy. I see a pop-star change into the dress of an emperor; a herd of poets in paradise playing roulette for beautiful women.