The Love of Singular Men

Press & Reviews

'When you read something genuinely new it's hard to describe it - you end up settling for comparisons - and The Love of Singular Men is truly a singular novel. It's ingenious like Cortazar or Nabokov, elliptical like Grace Paley, funny like Donald Barthelme. Upon finishing it you want to immediately meet the young man who wrote it, shake him vigorously by the hand and congratulate him on the beginning of a brilliant career. But Victor Heringer is gone. He left this beautiful book behind.' - Zadie Smith

‘Victor Heringer scrambles genres – tragic romance, pulpy noir, family drama – to plumb the false solace that narrative promises... its style, in James Young’s deft translation, is itself bracing, depraved, and, in the way only something truly melancholic can be, very funny.’ – Charlie Lee, The New York Review of Books

'The brief, precise scenes – incorporating photos, lists and handwritten passages – enable Heringer to cover a great deal in a short space and make a potentially gloomy story into a multilayered celebration of life. That the author died in 2018, aged 29, is a loss to international literature.' - John Self, The Guardian

‘A formally playful, inventive and moving meditation on complicity and regret ... the exuberance of Heringer’s prose is relayed beautifully in James Young’s thoughtful translation.’– Andrew van der Vlies, The Times Literary Supplement

'Brazilian writer Victor Heringer died in 2018 aged 29, but we should be glad to have The Love of Singular Men to remember him by [...] The writing aches beautifully while still leaving space for profound healing and humanity. - Rónán Hession, The Irish Times

‘Heringer once said that he loved the serendipity of creation, like exploring a mountain and discovering new places to twist your ankle. His commitment to heterodoxy, singularity and incongruity made him an artist of the loose end.’ – Lorna Scott Fox, The New Left Review

'Camilo endures the terrible events that play out over the course of the novel with an echoingly sad fortitude, writing beguilingly of the love he lost and then reclaimed. Heringer's novel is here to stay' –Paul Bailey, Literary Review

'What a fun, unsettling, and bold book this is! It breaks every form ... from the line level to the scaffold, with illustrations and lists and photographs along the way. Victor Heringer tells a queer story of love and heartbreak that’s at once familiar and unique. Heringer died very young and very tragically – I didn’t know to miss him, because I had never heard of him until I read this novel. But I miss him now.' – Adam Dalva, The Best Books We Read in 2023, Words Without Borders

'Of profound modesty and profound depths and profound beauty, it touches the soul of tragedy, the fact that hatred has such radioactive endurance [...] On one level, The Love of Singular Men is the most gorgeous queer coming-of-age story, and on another, it is a reckoning with homophobia so intense in the macho years of the dictatorship that murder seems the natural result of love.' – Barbara Epler, TANK Magazine

‘An electrifying, passionate piece of writing - unlike anything I’ve read. Most novels are, at base, very responsible pieces of work. Not headstrong or wayward. They don’t allow themselves the excursions and incoherences that life is full of. But Victor Heringer’s writing manages to pull off the miraculous feat of simultaneously playing constant truant to itself and being entirely present and focussed, first line to last. I don’t know how this was achieved (and also in this fantastic translation by James Young), but I’m very glad it was. What a loss. What a book.'- Toby Litt, author of A Writer’s Diary and Patience

‘Inventive, surprising and unsparing, The Love of Singular Men is just so unusually vivid. It’s an unforgettable book, as sad as it is beautiful, as full of love as it is tragic.’ - Wendy Erskine, author of Dance Move and Sweet Home

'If I had to choose a single adjective to describe this novel, the word would be "charming”.' – Adam Morris, The Baffler

‘One of the best novels of recent years.’ - Asymptote

'Heringer had little time to live, but he marked an entire generation of writers and readers.' - O Globo