A customer recommended The Boy in the Lake by Eric Swanson (£9.99) to me. Going home to Ohio to bury his grandmother, a man remembers back to his childhood and to the arrival of a youth that changed his life forever. Growing up, coming of age, first love and betrayal are all explored in precise understated prose. Brian Molloy's first novel The Year of Ice (£8.99) garnered rave reviews in the States and with good reason. Set in Minneapolis in 1978, the narrator is the happy go lucky school jock surrounded by admiring friends, who is hiding a guilty secret as he slowly begins to come to terms with his sexuality. Laugh out loud funny, it deftly captures a whole process that all lesbians and gay men have to deal with. Comfort and Joy by Jim Grimsley (£8.99) is a poetic and finely wrought novel that explores the difficult journey two men make toward love. Ford McKinney is a handsome, successful doctor raised in a well-to-do Savannah family. His longtime boyfriend, Dan Krell, is a shy hospital administrator with a painful childhood past. When the holidays arrive, they decide it's time to go home together. But the depth of their commitment is tested when Ford's parents cannot reconcile themselves to their son's choices and long-kept family secrets are revealed by a visit to Dan's mother. Grimsley is one of my favourite authors. ________________________________