Silverbourne

Between the murky waters of the Thames and the candlelit rooms of Silverbourne Manor, two men are about to discover that the hardest race isn't on the water. Freddy Penhaligon-Warren is a senior rower, club captain and professional consultant who has perfected the art of keeping his personal life as disciplined as his training schedule. Andy is a bisexual photographer with a Mexican heritage, a Fulham flat, and a talent for finding beauty in human forms. When they collide in a Richmond café, a boat club changing room and an ill-advised champagne lunch in Fulham, neither of them is looking for a relationship. That, of course, is precisely when it happens.

Set across the boathouses, galleries and country estates of West London and Oxfordshire, First Shot is a literary gay romance that takes its time. This is not a story of grand declarations or instant connection; it is the slower, more honest story of two men circling each other across oysters and Mezcal, gallery openings and head races, learning whether what they feel is real enough to act on. Woven through their story are Finn, a quietly aristocratic rower navigating love and loyalty at Silverbourne Manor, and Aly, his relentlessly charismatic boyfriend, whose presence complicates everything in the most entertaining way possible.

Warm, witty, and unashamedly specific about the world it inhabits, First Shot is the first full novel in the Silverbourne series. It is a book about belonging, about the small courage it takes to ask someone to stay, and about what happens when a man who rows before dawn and drinks Taittinger at lunch unexpectedly adopts a pub corgi called Braveheart. For readers who want their romance literary, their characters real, and their champagne properly cold.