The Disappearers

Kingston, 1988. A handful of gay men come together to rehearse a secret production of a play set in a prison, under Havelock Titus, a director in his fifties who tells the wary cast that for men like them the whole island is a jail. There is Eddy Porteous, nineteen, who cannot get inside the hopeless role he has been given; Jordan Brown, who sleeps in his car; and Matt Chin, handsome and hard to read. A crowd breaks into one rehearsal and beats them: one man dies, several are badly injured, and later two vanish. Through many narrators, a reporter's interviews from the mid-1990s and Havelock's letters about his years as a student in 1950s London, the book traces how the survivors deal with the hatred the night exposed, whether by forgetting, raging or searching for the men who are gone.

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About the book

Form

Novel

Set in

Jamaica, United Kingdom, 1950s–1990s

First published

2026

Author's age

56 when first published

ISBN

9780593717202 (Riverhead Books, United States)

9780241714409 (Hamish Hamilton, United Kingdom)

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