Rosewater by Liv Little review – a lyrical love affair | Fiction

Where is home? Do we ever really know where we belong? These are the questions that drive gal-dem founder Liv Little’s debut novel, Rosewater. At its centre is Elsie Macintosh, a gay 28-year-old poet of black Guyanese descent who left her parents’ house in Bristol after she tired of minding her twin brothers and settled down by herself in south London. The book opens on the morning Elsie is evicted from her flat.

For most of the book, Elsie is standing at the edge of a precipice, looking down. She is jobless and finds herself living with her estranged best friend, Juliet. For a long time, compliments about Elsie’s poetry “don’t convert to cash or opportunities”. Yet Rosewater is never mournful or dull. Little has a touch for counterbalancing tragedy with humour and moments of real, rousing joy. It’s such a relief to see the women in Elsie’s life – Juliet, Elsie’s friend for sex Bea, her maternal grandmother, as well as her older lesbian friend Maggie – keep her going. Think drinks, impromptu darts session and helpings of goat curry. Think lingerie-shopping and bonding over RuPaul’s Drag Race. It’s a pleasure too to read Elsie’s raw, heartfelt poetry (written for the book by the spoken word poet Kai-Isaiah Jamal) or the refreshingly original sex scenes that Little grounds in play, consent and mutuality.

Though Rosewater is billed as a love story, Elsie takes her own sweet time to figure out how to love. When she does, the novel becomes powerfully, almost unbearably moving. When Elsie reads her poetry at an event that wins her a publishing deal, she is also reading to win Juliet over, without quite knowing it. And later, when Juliet is admitted to hospital after an accident, Elsie is there by her side, day after agonising day. Rosewater is a beautiful ode to queer love and friendship, and a reminder that self-knowledge is often arrived at in the company of others.

Where is home? Do we ever really know where we belong? These are the questions that drive gal-dem founder Liv Little’s debut novel, Rosewater. At its centre is Elsie Macintosh, a gay 28-year-old poet of black Guyanese descent who left her parents’ house in Bristol after she tired of minding her twin brothers and settled down by herself in south London. The book opens on the morning Elsie is evicted from her flat.

For most of the book, Elsie is standing at the edge of a precipice, looking down. She is jobless and finds herself living with her estranged best friend, Juliet. For a long time, compliments about Elsie’s poetry “don’t convert to cash or opportunities”. Yet Rosewater is never mournful or dull. Little has a touch for counterbalancing tragedy with humour and moments of real, rousing joy. It’s such a relief to see the women in Elsie’s life – Juliet, Elsie’s friend for sex Bea, her maternal grandmother, as well as her older lesbian friend Maggie – keep her going. Think drinks, impromptu darts session and helpings of goat curry. Think lingerie-shopping and bonding over RuPaul’s Drag Race. It’s a pleasure too to read Elsie’s raw, heartfelt poetry (written for the book by the spoken word poet Kai-Isaiah Jamal) or the refreshingly original sex scenes that Little grounds in play, consent and mutuality.

Though Rosewater is billed as a love story, Elsie takes her own sweet time to figure out how to love. When she does, the novel becomes powerfully, almost unbearably moving. When Elsie reads her poetry at an event that wins her a publishing deal, she is also reading to win Juliet over, without quite knowing it. And later, when Juliet is admitted to hospital after an accident, Elsie is there by her side, day after agonising day. Rosewater is a beautiful ode to queer love and friendship, and a reminder that self-knowledge is often arrived at in the company of others.