Waltzing in like you've cut yourself a key

[sovay]

With apologies if I have accidentally stalked anyone on or adjacent to my friendlist, I am fascinated by how difficult it has just proven to locate a print copy of a small-press queer novel published ten years ago. I discovered Adam/M. A. Fitzroy's Make Do and Mend (2012) through a page of Natalie Marena Nobitz's History's Queer Stories: Retrieving and Navigating Homosexuality in British Fiction about the Second World War (2018); the romantic pairing of a wounded naval officer and a conscientious objector pinged my attention even before I scrolled back and found Nobitz describing the novel as "a modern re-write of Renault's novel that opts for an idealistic ending to signal its liberationist consciousness." I thought to myself that I would totally read a quasi-fix-it of The Charioteer (1953) and decided to see if I could acquire a copy. Not from my local library system. Not from AbeBooks, either. Out of luck with the Book Depository. Amazon seemed to suggest the possibility of used copies if I was willing to deal with their marketplace, but trying to follow the relevant link revealed that they have confused the novel with an entirely different book of the same name. I found a nice interview with the author from 2013 and became depressed that my own copy of Nicholas Monsarrat's The Cruel Sea (1951) has been in storage for almost that long—also slightly wary that I might have banged into the author on AO3—but the link to the publisher's website was d-e-d dead. If the author has a website of their own where I could drop a line and ask if we could arrange some sort of exchange of goods and services, I couldn't find it. Over at Barnes and Noble, I can with no difficulty at all find a recently released e-book, but I don't like e-books. I don't even like e-books of my own books except that other people buy them. I will read books online and as pdfs if I have no other options, but I do best with print and ink and in the case of this novel I don't see how to get hold of any. I genuinely did not expect it to be this complicated. I would rely on the random luck of used book stores, but I haven't been inside one in almost three years.

Comments

[regshoe]

How frustrating! I expect to have difficulties tracking down old obscure books, but you wouldn't expect something that recent to be that difficult to find. It sounds fascinating, too—I would totally read a fix-it of The Charioteer (er, with canon Ralph/Andrew? I'm intrigued by this choice). I hope you manage to find something.

[sovay]

It sounds fascinating, too—I would totally read a fix-it of The Charioteer (er, with canon Ralph/Andrew? I'm intrigued by this choice). I hope you manage to find something.

Thank you! I have leads from several people who have commented, which is really pleasant in and of itself, and at this point I am just so curious. I will obviously report if any of the leads pan out.