Objects of Desire by Neil Blackmore

Hugo Hunter was the most celebrated gay novelist of the 20th century. He published two masterpieces, securing his place alongside the dazzling literary greats of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and rubbing shoulders with everyone from Truman Capote to James Baldwin, Gore Vidal and George Orwell. But after decades of fame and excess, just as New York City enters the 1980s and awakes to the coming horror of AIDS, Hugo finds himself running out of money.

Out of nowhere, he receives an extraordinary lifeline: an offer from his longtime publisher. Two million dollars, for a memoir and a new novel. The money will solve all his problems – except for one thing.

Hugo Hunter is an imposter. He stole both of his novels. Now, how far will he go to produce a third?At once dark, moving and deliciously vicious, OBJECTS OF DESIRE traverses the 20th century, featuring an astonishing cast of characters.

It is both a colourful glimpse into the lives of the cultural elite, and a tense, gripping story of betrayal, deceit, and literary fraud.
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'Objects of Desire is an absolute gem. It is dark, funny and iconoclastic. The monstrous Hugo is wonderfully rude about the writers he meets. Nabokov is a “try-hard c***”, Mailer is a “sweaty, pale toad, entirely grey”. Hugo forgets to read his friend Gore Vidal’s huge tome on Lincoln, speed-reads what he can, then makes “high-end jokes about sex” to distract Vidal from the shallowness of his reading. A must-read for anyone who loves books, complete with a moral for wannabe writers: perhaps the only thing worse than failure is success.'   The Times