Andrew Kay loves this year’s City Reads book choice My Policeman by Bethan Roberts

It was a great honour for me to recently make a speech at the launch of the City Reads 2012 project and the announcement that the book is My Policeman by Bethan Roberts. It was a particular honour because having read the book I genuinely believe that this a fine and timely piece of writing.

Bethan has captured a sense of both time and place in her novel: Brighton is painted with a rare deftness of touch that does not lazily hang on clichés and stereotypes.

The time is pictured with a heavy sense of austerity at one end and luxury at the other, and the three
main characters straddle the fading embers of a society restricted by such class distinctions.

Mostly though, the book is about oppression, an age where sexuality was something to hide or hide away from, whether you were heterosexual, bisexual or homosexual – but particularly if you were homosexual.
I am 56, born in the year that My Policeman is set, and until reading the book I was unaware of the terrible extent of oppression that gay men lived under from both society and from the law.

“Brighton is painted with a rare deftness of touch that does not lazily hang on clichés and stereotypes”

We’ve come a long way and My Policeman is a welcome reminder of that, and also a firm nudge that we cannot allow bigotry of any kind to return.

But the book is not just about gay men; it’s equally the story of a woman who breaks away from her expected path and falls in love with a beautiful man who is out of place in so many ways. It was a relief to be finally allowed to talk about the book in public. I had been asked to read it months ago but to keep the choice under my hat, well, how difficult was that?! From page one I was gripped and wanted to tell everyone I know about it. I think that is an equally important factor in the City Reads project. Firstly encouraging people to collectively read the same book but secondly making us all talk about it.

My Policeman is a wonderful choice for City Reads 2012, a story that touches the heart and soul of Brighton and of the people who live here – I love the book and hope that you will too by buying it and reading along with so many of us.