A Record of the Evening

At seventy-four, Julian Essex can arrange anything for anyone—except his own life.

For nineteen years, Julian ran a private dining room and wine cellar in Barcelona. After every dinner, he recorded the guests, what they ate, what surprised him, and one sentence about the evening. Fifty-two years of meals and memory now fill two hundred and fourteen boxes in his East End home.

Then an auction catalogue claims that eleven valuable objects once stood in Julian’s dining room. He knows they did not. He writes a polite correction in ink. The response is an offer to catalogue his private archive for free.

As accurate records begin travelling beyond the purposes for which they were created, Julian’s life becomes evidence in other people’s hands. Every document is genuine. Every procedure is lawful. Together, they produce a version of him that is disastrously wrong.

Meanwhile, a plumbing emergency brings Dermot Lowry into Julian’s house—and slowly into his carefully ordered life. Dermot is a tradesman who communicates through repairs, invoices, meals, and the things he returns to finish. Julian can remember every dinner he ever served, but he cannot ask for a lift home, forgiveness, or love.

A Record of the Evening is a literary M/M romantic-suspense novel about two older men, the danger of being accurately misunderstood, and the intimacy that begins when neither can arrange the other.

A mature, slow-burning love story with open-door intimacy.