Open Water

Lydia Chin is a British dance choreographer whose long-term relationship with her dancer Darren Currie in London's East End of the late 1980s forms the palpable core of this story. Together, they come to feel both friends and lovers, making them visible in an unspoken community of black gay men who are also artists—yet who, by turns, seem to be invisible. Running through the book is a shock that reverberates from one generation to the next: Darren's violent death at the hands of another young black gay man—a death that Lydia can't fully understand because he hasn't told her about himself; her own pregnancy, which disconnects and binds her to Darren; and their alternating griefs and joys as two lovers and one new parent in a very public community. Written with sensitivity and dignity, Open Water is an intimate and beautiful study of identity, both individual and social, that intensifies the meaning of love even as it asks how so many years can pass between loss and grief.