Hall has an incredible talent for writing romances that are thoroughly ground in the people and the place. I love the way that his characters communicate openly and are fully-rounded humans whose emotions run the full gamut. Pansies is very much Hall at his very peak skill as we follow Alfie and Fen as they come to terms with the complexities of their blossoming relationship alongside complex feelings about the place where they grew up.

As someone who was born, and lived in for a few years, the North East of England, this book felt such a deep feeling of home for me. I also recognise the complicated feelings that arise around the area as it can be so glaring at times that it can feel like a place frozen in a time when things were more prosperous. But it is never not going to be home. Hall does a fantastic job of incorporating-in dialect and speech patterns so that the reader feels firmly seated in the setting of the story and can understand the people that surround our main characters.

As Hall acknowledges in his introduction to this revised edition, this is a very ambitious story with some thorny and emotional issues being confronted, however he handles them with an incredible level of skill and compassion. There is never a feeling that there are necessarily right and wrong answers and space is being held where characters can confront a sense of dissonance about their feelings and opinions.

At its heart, this book is a romance between two men and it is so beautiful and so very swoony.

Alexis Hall is very firmly a favourite author for me and I don’t think I will ever tire of the brilliance he brings to the genre. I don’t think I can recommend strongly enough this book to readers and am very excited to read more from the Spires series and Hall’s wider body of work in the future.