A beautiful story about two people choosing to love each other every day and building a beautiful life together, despite everything they had to go through. The premise was shocking but really helped drive the story and the character development. I loved getting at least one chapter from each of the kid’s perspectives and jumping back into their past and working back up to present, whilst going back and forth. I wasn’t expecting it but this book made me tear up more than once.

A sublime and disarmingly subtle novel, which does more in a short number of pages than some achieve in five times the length. The heart of this novel, the relationship between the two men, is so beautiful and poignant, and feels like a small window into something very intimate.

I received a digital copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

An atmospheric portrayal of gay, working-class life in a South Wales Valley, to read A Room Above a Shop is to feel held within the hands of a master craftsman in control of his form. This is truly an impressive debut, where the space in between the words and the things unsaid are given as much weight as the words on the page, with a poeticism unmatched in modern Welsh writing., I dare anyone to read this and not feel the ache of M and B’s story, their solitude and their desire.

This is a slight novel which reads as a stream of consciousness but do not let that put you off. The nameless characters are beautifully rendered and you can 'see' them going about their lives in rural Wales during the 1980s. As a gay couple living hidden lives I could not help but want to yell out for the injustice these characters and the LGBTQ+ community faced then and now. Love is love, as this novel shows. It is not something to be ashamed of and is pure heartfelt.

I was excited to achieve this ARC but once I was about to read it was impossible to comprehend the text due to the PDF file being scrambled once it was sent to my kindle. I think it would benefit readers if the ARCs are better formatted. Its a shame.

This was high on my TBR, so when I saw it on netgalley I jumped at the chance of having an early read and I’m so pleased I did. A poignant and touching story, even at its short length it delivers the punch its much bigger counterparts also do. It felt like a mirror into my soul and really took the life of queer adolescence and shone a light on the sense of longing and identity

A room in the shadows. A hidden closet.....................

Shapland writes through the cracks of lives hidden. He finds where some light manages to filter in and casts about in the shadows and gave us part of the story of M and B. Not even their names are whole.

It's so easy to dismiss someone who is just a shadow, not even a whole name, Shapland does not dismiss, he writes small flashes, small slices of life and so he took me along for a bit.

A quiet and sad read.

An ARC gently provided by author/publisher via Netgalley

Whilst the writing style was beautiful I really struggled to get into this book. It showed so much promise but sadly did not deliver (for me)

A stunning, poetic, beautifully written book of vignettes about a young man living above a shop with a older man. Only they understood their love, hidden from their community in Wales. Such a sad end, captures all the feelings.

Absolutely love how this was written, so many paragraphs were the best poetry have ever read.

was drawn to the story, set in 1980s Wales amid the backdrop of Section 28 and the AIDS crisis, for its poignant exploration of forbidden love told through sparse, evocative prose.

Unfortunately the highly stylised writing felt static at times, and the emotional distance made it hard for me to connect with the characters, leaving me ultimately indifferent to their fate.

Ultimately, a story I admired more than I felt. While it didn’t land for me, readers drawn to poetic prose and subtle storytelling may find much to appreciate here.

An ode to love, time and tragedy
—
In a debut that is sure to be remembered, Shapland conjures up both the recent past when Section 28 loomed over Britain in the wake of the growing AIDS crisis and a rural community that’s both idyll and confinement. His unnamed protagonists, B and M, ache towards each other in a rural Welsh village, one a shopkeeper, the other younger and newly orphaned, and their relationship unfolds in gentle, distanced wisps, almost bullet points of ideas: emotions held in check, actions imagined but withheld, dreams tamped down for fear of revelation. As their slow burn love unfolds, the world seems to stand still, to shift to allow them respite; until time catches up and love turns to tragedy.

Assured writing that speaks strongly in spare prose, the novel never tries to present the characters’ love as a dreamy perfection; there’s menace all around them and the only solace is in each other’s arms. For them, the future isn’t something to be wished for but something that will come regardless. But when it does, the book is unsparing of the characters and the reader, telling us that life goes on, because it must, because it will.

Many thanks to Granta for providing this ARC through NetGalley :)

I whistled through this in one quiet morning which felt the way this book was perhaps intended to be read. Soothing, understated, and attentive, A Room Above a Shop has a faltering start that blossoms into something very tender and poignant.

Set in rural Wales in the 80s, this short novel follows the ebb and flow of B & M's relationship that the two men keep hidden from wandering and hostile eyes. The quiet performance of their lives is unveiled before us in their shared quarters "above a shop", riddled with uncertainty and passion.

Shapland was right to keep this at the short page number it totals - the book reads as a brief but emotion-filled sigh that picks up the resonances of a beautiful yet harsh rural landscape with a light touch.

Pleased that this refrained from plunging head-first into voyeuristic trauma narratives and instead dips a calculated toe into what feels a very real, and human, depiction of a LGBTQ+ relationship in this place, time, and with these two people.

The intensity of this book, which combines raw and brutal clarity with lyrical simplicity, was breathtaking ,while the ending, stark and jolting, reduced me,not to tears, but to wrenching sobs

Set in a rural Wales in the wake of the miners’ strike, and in the deep dankness and spiritual darkness of the Thatcherite 1980s, it presents the love story of two men, drawn together by their initially tentative recognition of “difference” and overwhelmed by love in a very cold climate.It brought back to me that half-forgotten feeling that many of us had during those years of being dragged back into the worst of the 1930s Depression.

This is almost a very good book. However, the main characters are “named” M and B, which may have point-anonymity, perhaps, or facelessness-but I found it pointless and grating. The structure is episodic which betrays the novel’s origins in short stories, but in the context of a relatively short work, makes for undue fragmentation, and a feeling of dizzying discontinuity-which,again, may be intentional.

It moved me profoundly,different though the world it depicts is to the one in which my late partner and I lived together in a small West of Scotland town during the same period.

Thank you to NetGalley and to the publisher for my digital review copy.

a gorgeous, quiet and sad one-sitting read. captures the rural, small town working class life really well. beautifully written in sparse sentences, where every word is important.

A short, sparse, sad story of two men in a village in South Wales, still with memories of the hardships of the Miners‘ Strike and against the background of Section 28, AIDS and homophobia. B and M work together in M‘s family hardware store, and live together in the small room upstairs, but have to hide their real selves.

If you liked Andrew McMillan‘s Pity - you‘ll like this. I loved it.

A Room Above A Shop was brilliant! I loved the experience of reading it. Felt reflective, meditative. Poetic.

How do I even begin to talk about the injustice and huge heartbrake of having to conceal who you really are. Of having to hide your love? Of having to spend your life hidden between 4 walls? Why, oh why, is the world so cruel?

Starting Room Above a Shop has been a bit of a deja vu for me, especially as I've started it days after reading another book about a queer couple and the gay experience of the 80's. What was even weirder, was that both were written in this post modern style: short, clipped sentences, almost devoid of emotion, that I've found slightly irritating. But luckily I've stuck whit it and it rewarded me with such a soulful story that I couldn't not love!

If you want a one phrase review, I'd say: gay in the 80's in a small Welsh community. But really, you have to read this to feel the power of this heart-wrenching love story!

A Room Above a Shop by Anthony Shapland is a love story that evocatively captures little moments of working class life in a small village.

Maybe this novel shouldn't be read after Giovanni's Room. It's perfectly good, and I loved its understatedness and the way relationship between B and M was displayed. And yet something was missing for me, maybe because the book was so short, or because in committing to show-don't-tell in book form too little was actually shown.

3.5 stars rounded up.
With thanks to NetGalley and Granta for the arc.
This short novel tells the story of B, a young, rudderless man and M, eleven years older and owner of a ironmongers, and how they find solace and purpose in their hidden relationship and sexual awakening. Set in South Wales against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis and Section 28 this is a poignant and, at times, claustrophobic portrayal of gay, working-class love and life during a particularly difficult period in British history.
I found Shapland’s writing to be lyrical and poetic, although at times a little heavy-handed - it felt as if the author couldn’t resist the urge to over-write, when a more sparse prose may have served the story better in places. The over-use of metaphor and descriptive passages, whilst useful for helping position the reader in the scene, acted as a barrier to feeling connected to B & M - their characters get lost in the minutiae of their environment.
Overall, a good read and a writer with great potential.