12/05/2026
Curtis Garner is an author from Cornwall who, in his latest novel, Orange, writes that beautifully familiar landscape we all love in our coastal town of Newquay. Curtis will be at Clemo Books on Thursday 14 May, 7pm, tickets on sale now. 🐢
Orange is a dual-timeline novel that flits cleverly between 2018 Portscatho, Cornwall, and 2023 East London as Daniel Orange hosts his boyhood sweetheart, Jago, in his London flat. Their reunion is sweet, though it soon becomes clear that the two have fallen into (what the kids call) a long-distance situationship, marred by confusion and hesitation. Jago is kind, witty, seemingly perfect, everything Daniel wants, but there is something unspoken between them, something neither is willing to unearth. 🌊
However, Jago’s visit fragments Daniel’s hard-fought-for sense of self, his metropolitan q***r identity, calling into question how compatible he is with his rural not-quite-lover.
One aspect Sonny loved was the emphasis on familial conflict, the sacred relationship between boy and mother, and the way Daniel bears witness to his mother and grandmother’s quarrelling, how she seems to regress into a teenager like himself. Most significantly, though, the complicated dynamic between mother and father, the refusal to stay separated, no matter how it pains them to be together. What has Daniel learned about love from watching them? It is stubborn, as sure as the turn of the tide, with all the same violence.
Without spoiling the plot, the structure of this novel is masterfully executed, amplifying tension through jarring transitions between time frames. This pace amplifies the feeling of disorientation that is central to Daniel’s experience, the desperation to bring together these two severed time frames, eras of boyhood and manhood that refuse to harmonise.
