Suki Fleet's This is Not a Love Story is certainly one of the most tender, passionate and hopeful novels I've read recently. 
 The title claims that the book is not a love story and that rings true to me because the novel is much more than a conventional m/m romance. Remee and Julian's story is one of friendship, harshness, resilience, small acts of kindness, brutality, terrible desperation and blinding hope that resonated deeply all the way through my being. 
 Remee and Julian wander warily in the harsh and dangerous reality of homeless life in London, a city that can be tough and unforgiving even to those who don't live barely surviving at the bottom of its streets, huddled under archways and sleeping rough on its pavements. Despite the grimness and squalor around them, Remee and Julian find strength and hope in one another and stubbornly cling to each other's presence and love as their only means of survival. When events take over and tear them apart, it's only their fierce will to endure and get another chance that prevents them from falling apart completely. 
 The two main characters are wonderful creations: Remee is mute and scared, his interior life, in the absence of words, bursting through the beautiful pictures he obsessively sketches in his pad. He starts out as a weak victim but his inner strength grows through the novel and he turns out to be the real momentum behind the boys' final escape from London to Cornwall in search of a life more connected to nature . Julian is equally compelling - although we only get glimpses of his troubled upbringing (and it's a shame not to be able to know more about him), he comes across as a thoughtful, verbally restrained, generous young man, a 'beautiful, glowing creature' as Remee would have it. It's thus really heartbreaking to witness his resolve faltering as he breaks apart and falls back into his old drug addiction . 
 Remee and Julian are surrounded by a cast of great secondary characters - some generous (Cassey, Kay), some lost (Roxy, Pasha) some fleeting in and out of the life of the main protagonists. Out of this cast, Crash is of course powerfully instrumental in the rebirth of Remee's hope and determination and he totally deserves his own novella ( Wild Summer, which I'll start reading straightaway). 
 Suki Fleet's prose is meditative and nuanced - it soars high in the most romantic parts of the novel and then plunges fearlessly all the way down to the depths of poverty and disorder. She also doesn't shy away from the grim reality of prostitution and from the description of the longing and desire connecting Remee and Julian on a physical level. Some readers may flinch at the fact that both characters are very young but I've found these scenes - that are explicit, beautiful and honest in their quiet restraint and never lurid or purely voyeuristic - to be important and necessary to build up and reinforce the deep and unbreakable bond that runs between them. 
 This wonderful book was my first novel by Suki Fleet and I cannot wait to read more of her works.