So English, so horny, so gay; all things that should make a book interesting, but this one just wasn't to me.

A lovely historical fiction rife with research and written with extreme care for its characters, I learned a lot reading this book. It was thoughtful and smart, emotional and surprising. Though when I zoom out I loved the experience, I trudged through it. I found the plot minimally compelling and it was a little too easy to put down. Maybe that's on me — historical fiction isn't always my jam. But I enjoyed what I learned from this book.

An excellent look at Victorian era relationships and the restrictive society of the time. While this historical fiction piece was quite literary and may not be for everyone, I really enjoyed the longing that seeped through every page. Definitely an excellent and highly recommended debut.

I really enjoyed this book--I thought the sex scenes were well-crafted and interesting and the way that so much of the novel occurs in the characters' thoughts, their anxieties about how what they're doing clashes with the reality of the world around them, was captivating. As some other reviewers point out on here, Crewe does sanitize some of the historical truths about the people these characters are based on (e.g., penchants for eugenics), and I do think it would have made for an even more complex and interesting novel had those things been grappled with rather than thrown by the wayside.

4/5

I loved the premise of this book. Two men are writing about homosexuality while subtly exploring their own relationships. The author wrote this because he said it was a book he would have liked to read. You can definitely tell he's an academic- this is very literary. Still, I enjoyed the experience of reading it and would try this author again!

A brilliant debut historical fiction at its best.Based on true events an intimate look at homosexuality during the Victorian era.Fascinating heartbreaking the characters come alive Tom Crewe writes lyrically an author I will be. recommending and following excellent for book club discussions. #netgalley#thenewlife

This was a bit of a slog, and I think that its for a certain type of reader. I look forward to picking this up again in the future, but this first read wasn't fantastic for me personally.

Crewe's novel explores the complicated lives of queer people during the restrictive era of Victorian morality and their dreams of a more progressive society. An ambitious project, it is clear that Crewe took care with the subject matter and the amount of research he poured into the pages is admirable.

I loved this smart, sexy, brainy debut and interviewed Tom Crewe on my podcast, Reading the Room! It would make for a great book club read - morally nuanced, timely, queer, engaging from the first page to last.

The New Life centers around two couples in the late 1800's and explores the idea of what being an "invert" (gay) would be like at the time. One: a wealthy man who's lived off his fathers investments and who is generally a gentleman of society, married, had daughters, but he's always been at odds with what society has deemed to be appropriate behavior. John Addington would love nothing more than to be free of his societal bounds and express his love freely to whomever he chooses. After meeting Henry; a young progressive writer who's idea of sexuality also lies outside the norm (bisexual, asexual?) they begin to collaborate on a book about the subject in hopes that it will open the conversation about homosexuality and perhaps allow people to stop from hiding.
After Oscar Wilde's trial and being found guilty of such behaviors they each have to decide if defending their book would be wise, will society embrace their ideas? or will they end up shamed and imprisoned?

I liked the overall story and there were some really steamy scenes that were described well and were entertaining. As it goes with historical fiction it is a slow burn and though the stakes are high for the characters it moved in a slower pace however for the genre I thought it was very well written, insightful and an enjoyable read. Lagged a bit for me at the end and I skimmed a bit in order to get through some wordy chunks.

read this if you liked historical fiction featuring LGBTQ characters and some very real challenges the community has historically faced.

John Addington, an “invert,” and Henry Ellis, a sexually frustrated newlywed, meet via letters in 1894 and decide to write a book together defending homosexuality. When it all blows up in their faces, they have steep consequences to face.

Set against the backdrop of Oscar Wilde’s trial for “gross indecency,” THE NEW LIFE illuminates the suppression and oppression of homosexuals in Victorian England. While this is an enormously important (and timely!) piece of history, the novel as a work of literature comes across as bland. One main character is monstrously selfish, the other is a colossal wimp, and neither of them reads as particularly interesting. The writing is period-accurate but too dry to keep me engaged. Because of the subject matter, I felt obligated to like this book (I did, at least, give it three stars rather than two, simply for the sake of the subject matter), but in the end, I just didn’t.

Thanks Netgalley and Publisher for this advanced copy.

The New Life followed the story of 2 guys and their affairs. I loved how Tom Crewe showed us not only gay people life in history, but also Ellis as a lesbian. I love Ellis relationship with Henry.

Thank you to NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read this book early! This is a beautiful book of heartbreaking proportions and I loved getting lost in the story. Knowing queer history, I rooted for the main characters while anticipating heartbreak. For anyone interested in late nineteenth century queer history told through the lens of a few complicated characters, this book is an excellent choice.

Real Rating: 4.75* of five, rounded up

First, read this:
"How to define extremity? The greatest extremity? Lust, not as quickened heartbeat or dizzy possibility, but as lagging sickness, a lethargy. Lust as slow poisoning. Lust as a winter coat worn in summer, never to be taken off. Lust as a net, cast wide, flashing silver, impossible to pull in. Lust as a thousand twitching, tightening strings, sensitive to every breeze. Lust as a stinking, secret itch. Lust carried leadenly in the day, dragged to bed. Lust at four in the morning, spent chokingly into a nightshirt. Lust as a liquid mess, dragged into your beard, drying into tendrils, the smell trapped in your nostrils."
In that passage from the very beginning of the book you are clear what this book's greatest strengths...specificity and sensory evocation...are, and what its weakness is: prolixity. (One fewer. Just...one fewer.)

But as a novel, on every story-based measure of characterization, action, world-building (late Voctorian London is, in fact, as alien from our world as any spaceship), this first effort from Author Crewe is a wild success. As a salvo notifying us of the arrival of a new vessel, it's head-and-shoulders above most of what I've read in the past few years.

A fictionalization of two real people, who in this book do not meet but do collaborate on an extremely provocative and daring text...Sexual Inversion was its title...that dealt frankly and openly with the shocking idea that homosexual desire is not a perversion but an inversion, an opposite force, to the common-or-garden heterosexual variety of desire. In our rather less interesting realm of blah reality, the two never even corresponded that anyone is aware of. It's to be assumed each had heard of the other, being rather well-known people, but there is not a scintilla of a fact in this story's imagining of the literary work that John and Henry get committed to paper.

Poignantly, Henry Ellis isn't what we'd call gay, but a urophilic heterosexual; it wouldn't send him to jail, like sex with men would John Addington, but it would get him talked about and ostracized. The points of connection between the characters are real, and in Henry's case stem from a sincerely held belief that no one should be shamed for consensual sexual desires. In the 1890s. In LONDON, stuffiest and second-most perverted (Paris, of course, was first) of international brothels. We haven't come to terms with that radical idea yet and it's the third decade of the twenty-first century!

Henry and John's book is cursed, in a sense; it's coming to light at exactly the moment the world's spotlight of attention is glaring on Oscar Wilde's trial for "gross indecency," that most cishet male of crimes. (I mean, the Boer War was grossly indecent, the Native Genocide in the US was grossly indecent, but fucking a man who wants you to do it?) They're all the way through writing it and there's even a publisher willing to publish it. But is this the responsible thing for a family man (John) to do at this juncture? His daughters will likely suffer for the daring act. His wife will most certainly suffer more, and she is one whose suffering has been extraordinarily difficult because, of necessity, it's done in private and John is a scion of privilege as all men are. He isn't unsympathetic to her suffering through their marriage; he feels quite guilty about it; but it does not feel real to him because he is in no way aware of what a woman—any woman at all—confronts and endures by virtue of her sex. Blind, oblivious to his world of mind-bending luxury, he is gobsmacked when his wife demands that he consider her suffering as suffering, even saying to him that she is a receptacle "fitted to receive your waste." That statement, like the concept it arises from, is utterly devastating from any angle you look at it.

So too the Ellises are in some peril if the book comes out. Edith Ellis is a lesbian, and a campaigner for women's rights. Henry is a species of fraud, an expert on sex without a dog in the fight, so to speak, by dint of his virgin's estate. Still, knowledge does not need to be practical or no one would study particle physics. Their, um, unconventional set-up is so by design and not, like the Addingtons' ménage, a jerry-rigged response to reality's exegencies.

The famous Wilde trial, despite its centrality to the events of the novel, appears nowhere on the pages. I was surprised to note this as I finished the read. I'd expected some of it to appear and none except its fact as an occurrance ever did. This, after a moment's contemplation, made me very happy. We're fictionalizing the past any time we read about it, but I think Author Crewe's choice to leave this huge and celebrated event as, more or less, background noise was spot on. This kind of focus, of disciplined intentional limiting of field, isn't common in beginners. It was a delight to find it here.

I did mention that prolixity issue. The novel's about sexuality, and in a time of even greater repression than we are in at present. The sexual events are within the bounds of modern acceptability standards for a novel. They aren't in any unusual configurations for twenty-first century readers of even the most superficial sophistication. They aren't prurient, as in looking on from a remove and deriving judgmental or pleasurable titillation from the acts. But they, like so many things in the novel, are just that three-word clause, that one-too-manyeth ellipsis, too long. As one routinely tutted at for being wordy, I totally empathize. I did find myself thinking, "okay, enough now," more often than I expected to in a book professionally edited.

But, and this is important!, none of that made me feel frustrated or took me away from my focus on the story unfolding. It is a very good story. It speaks, through voices long dead, of the world of today as it was in its borning moments. It is a fine and worthy addition to your To Be Reads if you are at all interested in Victorian sexuality, the price of honesty within relationships, and the incalculable costs in unhappiness and suffering of enforcing conformity.

Well if this is any indication of the quality of what 2023 has in store, it’s going to be an amazing book year. I’m completely guilty of casually throwing out the superlative love, as in, “I love(ed) this or that”, but in this case it’s absolutely merited. London 1894, and two men, John Addington and Henry Ellis begin to collaborate on a book that is a study of inverts, the archaic term for homosexuals. Both men have highly personal reasons for pursuing it. Addington has been married for well over twenty years and has three daughters, but has struggled with the knowledge of being gay, and suppression is no longer tenable. Ellis, newly wed has a decidedly modern marriage, he and his wife living in separate dwellings, but carrying on with a respect for each other despite yet to be revealed sexual proclivities. But when Oscar Wilde is brought to trial for sodomy the magnitude of what they’re writing creates a ripple effect that could potential destroy not just themselves but anyone within their orbit.
“Any act of “gross indecency” between males, in public or in private, is a misdemeanor punishable with two years’ incarceration and hard labor”.
Debut writer Tom Crewe does a brilliant job of turning what could be stodgy historical relics into loving breathing highly sexual individuals. None of it is done salaciously, but instead makes them relevant and, frankly current, including shrouds of secrecy that many LGBTQ+ people still feel today. As one of the gay men says to Ellis:
“Imagine, Henry, if you had no one to describe your life to. That all its meaning was a dark secret.”
“What do you tell them?”
“Different things-that the world must change, and not they.”
Which beings up another point of the book. With current laws enacted like Floridas ‘Don’t Say Gay’ which for sure will be adopted by other highly conservative states, the book shows not only how far some things have come, but how ridiculously far we’ve stumbled backwards at the hands of ignorance, prejudice and misguided fear. Expect this to show up in December when I’m compiling my Best of the Year list. A fantastic book. Thanks to Scribner for the #gifted copy.

3.5 ⭐️
The New Life is Tom Crewe’s historical fiction debut novel based loosely off of true events about gay activism and homophobia in the 19th century. While the pace was a little slow for my personal taste, I liked following John and Henry’s lives and the intertwining side characters. Definitely an interesting change of scenery from the modern setting centered queer fiction I have been reading. Thank you to NetGalley and Scribner for the e-ARC!

OUT TODAY from Scribner! The New Life is an important LGBTQ+ historical fiction novel about fighting for change and the many different ways one can live within their personal relationships.

Taking place in the late 1800s England, we follow John Addington and Henry Ellis who are cowriting a book on what is termed "inversion" also known as homosexuality. Addington writes from more of the social aspect. As a gay man who is married to his wife Catherine, he wants to break free if you will from his life. Ellis writes from the scientific perspective, as a doctor himself, but one who hasn't had sex (though he holds high interest in the subject). Together they write this book that challenges everything their current society believes in.

This novel is very progressive in its views - the characters are part of The New Life, which is a movement that seeks to change their laws and others' beliefs. The New Life (this book, not the movement within) is very explicit and erotic. There are many scenes that I wasn't expecting per se, but I think they add to the characters' development. I enjoyed reading about these characters, them and their relationships felt reminiscent of Sally Rooney to me (which you already know I adore). There were times in the beginning where I felt confused by what I was reading, and perhaps a lull in the middle there somewhere, but overall I enjoyed this. I would definitely read from this author again in the future.

This was a truly captivating read. There is such a density in the prose while still holding quite a lot of beauty.

This is about two men who decide to work together in the creation of a book that could be very dangerous for them, though they never meet. Both men are married in vastly different relationships. And they bring equally import perspectives to the book they write.

The New Life brings up some really fantastic topics, like homosexuality, sex, the varying roles between husbands and wives in non traditional marriages and even transgender or nonbinary discussions. The idea that this is a new kind of life is the premise for the title, which I found brilliant.

I thought this was a really in depth novel that took me some time to parse through. Whole enjoyable, this was not a book that I could easily fly through. I really adored the relationship between Henry and Edith, ultimately.

This is a story about living your true life in the face of a hostile society.  In late 19th century England, two men begin writing a book about homosexuality.  Their argument is that homosexuality is a natural element of human sexuality and should not be looked down upon and certainly not criminalized, as was the case at the time in England.  The authors themselves are quite different.  John Addington is a prominent member of society, married to Catherine, and has theee daughters.  During the course of their marriage, Catherine has sought, with varying degrees of success, to accept that her husband is gay.  This grows more difficult when John becomes involved with Frank -- a more established relationship with a man than John had ever pursued.  

His co-author, Henry Ellis, is a proponent of a movement known as "The New Life," which seeks to upend existing social mores.  As part of this project, Henry marries Edith in an attempt by both to show that marriage can be an intellectual partnership and friendship apart from physical intimacy.  Indeed, the two live separately, and Edith spends much of her time with Angelica.

Despite their differences, both John and Henry are convinced their book, a rigorous historical and scientific examination of homosexuality, will go a long way toward convincing their countrymen that it no longer makes sense to criminalize homosexuality.  But shortly before the book is due to be released, Oscar Wilde is arrested.  The coverage of his arrest raises serious questions about their project, and John and Henry must decide whether to push on and assume the risks -- for them and their families -- that come with releasing their book.  

This is a powerful and singular story.  The author does an excellent job of capturing what it was like to be gay at this moment of time -- and the heavy tension between pursuing your true self against the rejection of society.  The book deftly weaves in real-life events to paint a picture of life in the late 19th century.  The juxtapositions of John and Henry, and that of their wives, Catherine and Edith, illuminate the similarities and differences of those who feel fundamentally separate not just in society at large but in their own marriages.  The book is also an interesting exploration of the costs of seeking change, particularly when there are consequences that will be borne not just by you but by your family. 

Highly recommended!

In summer 1894, two men find themselves in unconventional relationships at a time when English society is skeptical, at best, of anything they view of deviations from the norm. The two decide to jointly author a book that seeks to take on these societal attitudes in an effort to change them, drawing on historical analysis, scientific study, and personal accounts. But when a high-profile arrest occurs just before their book is to published, the risks of moving forward with their projects become all the more stark. And both men must face whether the risks, ranging from being ostracized by society to possible imprisonment, are worth the risks to them, their families, and their cause.

This is an impactful work of historical fiction. Effectively evoking the period and using real-life events as a jumping off point, the book offers an original and thought-provoking story about family, love, societal expectations and roles, the pace of change, and freedom.

Highly recommended!