Evenings and Weekends: A brilliant debut novel about queer life from Oisín McKenna

London; 2019. As a beached whale lies beside the Thames, a sweltering summer is leaving the city’s residents with a sense that something – whatever that is – is going to happen, and when it does, it will be as explosive as a thunderstorm.

For Maggie, it’s about being pregnant and broke, and facing the prospect of returning to the hometown just beyond the city that she had fought so hard to escape; this time, with her partner Ed, who has his own demons.

Then there’s Phil, Maggie’s best friend, who is struggling to make sense of his own life as a gay man. His brother Callum is about to be married, but there are problems on that front too.

Oisín McKenna’s debut novel, Evenings and Weekends, begins on a Friday afternoon as the weekend approaches. Apart from a short coda, it essentially concludes at the end of that weekend. But don’t let that give you the impression that the 352 pages are in any way slow.

It’s a beautifully paced exploration of characters who are by no means unflawed, but feel completely authentic, as they try to work their way through particularly intense periods of their lives.

The central characters are all from working-class backgrounds and McKenna is excellent at weaving this into other aspects of their experiences – particularly in terms of sexuality and gender, but with ethnicity featuring too, via a strong backstory.

McKenna is a spoken-word artist, and this comes through in the musicality and rhythm of the language in the book, which is not only very effective, but joyful.

A gritty work, it’s sexually explicit in places, but always empathic, while never pretending that every relationship doesn’t have its difficult elements.

It’s also a love letter to London – particularly the east of the city – almost a walking tour of the Hackney I live in, really capturing, in detail, many places I know, together with introducing me to ones I will now check out!

The book came out early this month, but it’s taken me a while to feel that I’ve processed my thoughts together coherently enough to review it. It made me think of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway – particularly in terms of the timeframe of the story.

The book was recommended to me just before publication, by a friend who’s a friend of the author. I’ve been struggling with reading in recent months but am glad that I didn’t put off getting a copy. Indeed, I read it over three days – which in present circumstances, is a minor miracle.

Ultimately, I think that Oisín McKenna has given us a queer novel that it is not only brilliant, but links back to that iconic work by Woolf. The key difference here being its exploration of working as opposed to upper class, plus sexuality and gender, yet all within a similarly limited timeframe. And of course, the Bloomsbury Set, of which Woolf was a central figure, was sexually and gender diverse.

I cannot recommend this enough.