Pansies

Alexis Hall

Feb 2020 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Cornell Collins

About this audiobook

Alfie Bell is . . . fine. He's got a six-figure salary, a penthouse in Canary Wharf, the car he swore he'd buy when he was eighteen, and a bunch of fancy London friends. It's rough, though, going back to South Shields now that they all know he's a fully paid-up pansy. It's the last place he's expecting to pull. But Fen's gorgeous, with his pink-tipped hair and hipster glasses, full of the sort of courage Alfie's never had. It should be a one-night thing, but Alfie hasn't met anyone like Fen before. Except he has. At school, when Alfie was everything he was supposed to be, and Fen was the stubborn little gay boy who wouldn't keep his head down. And now it's a proper mess: Fen might have slept with Alfie, but he'll probably never forgive him, and Fen's got all this other stuff going on anyway, with his mam and her flower shop and the life he left down south. Alfie just wants to make it right. But how can he, when all they've got in common is the nowhere town they both ran away from. Contains mature themes.

Ratings and reviews

Alfie returns to his home town of South Shields (North of England) for his best friends' wedding. An investment banker, big, muscled and tattooed he looks the typical alpha Northern male, but he's also gay, something that his working class father is having trouble dealing with. Overwhelmed by the contrast between his glamorous, superficial, wealthy life in London and the grittiness of his home town Alfie leaves the wedding and goes into a typical pub, only to see a delicate man wearing a pink jumper and hipster glasses with pink tips to his hair drinking a glass of rose wine. What starts off as a one-night stand turns strange when Alfie's lover turns out to be a boy he mercilessly bullied at school. He might have bullied Fen back then, but at least Fen knows who he is and is comfortable with himself whereas Alfie has no idea how to reconcile being gay with his inner voice and his ingrained beliefs. In fact, this book is all about reconciliation for Alfie. Reconciling his career in the South with his home in the North, his relationships with his family and friends, being gay with his instincts, what he likes with what he thinks he should like. I loved Alfie and I loved Fen, I loved their tentative relationship which is very much two steps forward and one step back, I loved everything about this romance.

Beautiful storytelling.

About the author

Alexis Hall is the author of numerous novels, including The Affair of the Mysterious Letter, the Arden St. Ives series, and the Spires series.

Cornell Collins was a hippie, a mod, a punk, a new-romantic, and a new-waver. Now, he proudly calls himself "newly middle aged." Though he has always considered life to have been better in the 70s and 80s, narrating audiobooks has shown Cornell that life in the modern world can, in some ways, be just as good.