Four years ago, the Asian-American author Jeremy Atherton Lin’s debut, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out, won the US National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. Deep House is a sort of sequel, a similar combination of memoir and non-fiction reporting. It is dedicated this time not to gay subculture but to the subject of the viability and endurance of gay relationships. Lin uses his own long-term partnership as a prism through which to examine the issue.

Lin has serious intentions. Across a thirty-year sweep, he chronicles meeting his partner, also called Jeremy (the ‘you’ to whom the book is addressed) in a London nightclub and figuring out all the existential stuff – what love means, who should pay the bills – while also documenting how the prospects for their transatlantic relationship shifted this way and that as they navigated immigration laws and other obstacles in the USA and the UK.

Lin’s descriptive talents are best displayed when he turns to people. Accounts of meetings with neighbours, landlords, work colleagues and fellow travellers are consistently entertaining and memorable. In a San Francisco cult video store, the two Jeremys worked with ‘beautiful, bald Dahlia, who learned to cook in the Caribbean, then