“He had stepped into a February evening sixty-five years ago and found something he had no framework for. He had kept going back.”
Elliot Calloway is good at keeping his distance. He has a flat above a letting agent in Hull’s old town, a freelance design career he can manage from a desk, and a set of careful habits that keep the world at arm’s length. He is not, by any measure, a man things happen to.
Then one February evening on a street called Land of Green Ginger, something happens to him.
He steps through and arrives in 1958 London: the clothes wrong, the phone useless, sixty-five years from home. In a Bloomsbury boarding house he meets Thomas Ashworth — a secondary school teacher, precise and private and quietly extraordinary — and finds himself returning. Again. And again. Across months and two timelines, through the warm rooms and careful distances of a man who has spent fifteen years learning to be invisible, something is building that neither of them has words for yet.
But the world Thomas inhabits is not safe. The Wolfenden Report has recommended decriminalisation and changed nothing in law. The streets are watched. The cost of visibility is real and paid daily. And Elliot, who comes from a world where the story ended differently, must reckon with what it means to love someone you cannot stay with — and what it costs a man to be truly seen in a world determined not to look.
Secretly is a queer historical romance about time, distance, and the specific courage it takes to stop managing your life from the outside. It is set in present-day Hull and 1958 London, and it does not look away from what that year actually meant.
Perfect for readers who love:
✔️ Queer historical fiction that takes the history seriously — no anachronistic comfort, no easy resolution
✔️ Slow-burn romance between emotionally guarded men who communicate in understatement
✔️ Time-slip stories where the mechanics stay mysterious and the emotional stakes are everything
✔️ 1950s England rendered in period-accurate detail — Bloomsbury boarding houses, the Fitzroy Tavern, the long shadow of Wolfenden
✔️ Literary romance with a quiet, interior voice and prose that earns its moments
✔️ Hull as a setting — its old town, its streets, its particular character
✔️ Love stories that understand why some people are afraid of them
