A Love Like Blood

By Victor Yates

Subjects: Fathers and sons, African Americans, Terminally ill parents, Lambda Literary Awards, Lambda Literary Award Winner, Gay teenagers, Fiction, Identity (Psychology), Racially mixed youth, LGBTQ novels

Description: Half Somali and Cuban, 17-year old Carsten Tynes, deals with the intricacies of sexuality, race, Americanism, syncretism, and migration under his dying father's abusive hand in A Love Like Blood. Set in 1998, his family relocates to Beverly Hills, MI to expand their photography business. His father has lung disease and promises to give him the business if he marries his ex-girlfriend. Faced with an unwanted marriage and the slow death of his father, Carsten retreats behind his camera. His camera becomes the loose thread that slowly unravels his relationship with his father and reveals the unseen world of "men who move at night." However, it is his infatuation with his neighbor, Brett that severs the symbolic umbilical cord between his father and him. When death pushes his father and Brett together, he makes a dangerous decision to protect them.