An Observer Best Debut Novel of 2025 and Hay Festival Book of the Year, A Room Above a Shop by Anthony Shapland is a poignant and beautiful tale of secret love. Set in a Welsh valley town in the late 1980’s, against a backdrop of industrial decline and the emerging AIDS crisis, it tells the story of two unhappily closeted gay men, M and B (symbolically shielded by the use of only their initials). Drawn to each other one fateful evening, they begin a tentative relationship in an insular, small-town community which would shun and shame them if the truth were revealed.
B recognises M, from Jones the ironmongers, at Christmas drinks in a local bar. Everyone knows M, he is the ‘ear of the village,’ dispensing small-talk and tools, along with tips for woodworm, leaky gutters, a panoply of minor household emergencies. B also recognises something in the older man, a look, hesitation, or maybe a certain solitude.
By the evening’s drunken end, that awareness is returned with an invitation by M, to meet for a daytime walk on the shepherd’s rock, a high point overlooking the valley. B prepares for this meeting with new clothes and a hearty splash of Brut 33, and by the end of the afternoon, their chat unstopped by beer, he has revealed his feelings of entrapment in this place where nothing changes. At this point in time, he doesn’t even have a job.
Days or mere hours later, a ‘Help Wanted’ sign goes up in the window of Jones & Son ironmongers, and change is invited in.
This insightful, poetic novel follows M and B’s relationship as it unfurls. On the shopfloor, they’re the overalled gaffer and apprentice, careful to avoid the speculation of curious customers. Upstairs, M has taken B in, ostensibly as a lodger. It feels like a long awaited first love.
There’s some lovely writing here, particularly in Shapland’s portrayal of the room above the shop. After the last ting of the till at close of trading, it is their haven and safe space.
‘No word or deed reaches the ground from this floating platform, on this mattress, this raft, on this ocean adrift in the afternoon sun. This room lightly tethered by stairs.’
Outside of their cocoon lies a town scarred by the 1980’s miners’ strikes and pit closures, the land left to sour, its men sent on reskilling courses, ‘writing a cv on a word processor’. Outside too is the government AIDS information leaflet, tea-stained on the shop counter. Their customers will have a lot to say on the subject, they have strong opinions on ‘men like that’ and their plague.
Trying to grow their relationship in a confined space, M and B begin to quail under the weight of their concealment. The very bones of the building sense it.
‘The third stair up from the shopfloor is rotten…It gives underfoot, a squeal and snap as the split worsens…An early warning.’
A late plot curveball is shattering in an exquisite debut that marks Shapland as a writer to watch.
A Room Above a Shop by Anthony Shapland is published by Granta Books, 160 pages.
