Boyfriend Material

British romcom is its own instrument, self-deprecation tuned to load-bearing pitch, and Boyfriend Material is the desk's pick for its best modern recording. Alexis Hall's fake-dating comedy arrives assembled from classic parts — disaster bisexual with a tabloid problem, buttoned barrister with a five-year plan, one mutually beneficial arrangement — and then plays them with such specific, wounded charm that the desk re-shelved it from comedy to comfort partway through and has not moved it back.

Luc O'Donnell's problem is genetic and photographic. Son of two rock stars who split before he could walk, he exists to the press as a cautionary footnote to his father's comeback, and one blurry misjudged photo is enough to spook the donors of the beetle-conservation charity he works for, a doomed institution drawn with the protective fondness the desk shares and without illusions. The prescribed remedy is respectability by association: a presentable boyfriend, briefly, for the cameras and the gala season. Enter Oliver Blackwood, ethical vegetarian, criminal barrister, a man so composed he apologises in complete paragraphs — and, the book slowly discloses, every bit as lonely as Luc, merely tidier about it. The arrangement's terms are struck over the worst first date in recent fiction, and the negotiation of clauses, what counts as pretending, what counts as noticing, becomes the whole tender machinery of the book.

What the desk admires is Hall's honesty about damage without solemnity about it. Luc's flinch-first defences and Oliver's performance of perfection are both survival architectures, built by parents who are the book's real antagonists in two registers, absent and exacting respectively, and the comedy (which is relentless, quotable, and conducted largely through a supporting cast the desk would follow into further volumes, and did) never has to stop for the feelings, because it is how the feelings travel. The moment the fake relationship's paperwork fails is visible chapters ahead and lands anyway, which is the trope done right.

Honest notices: the miscommunication quotient runs high by design, both leads being fluent avoiders; readers wanting efficient emotional disclosure have queued for the wrong instrument. Heat is present but discreet, in the British manner. Content notes for parental neglect and a late-arriving illness subplot.

Who is this for? Fake-dating loyalists, readers who like their banter with an exposed nerve underneath, and anyone who has ever apologised for being loved incorrectly. The sequels exist and are welcome, continuing the couple rather than replacing them, which the desk notes is the rarer and braver franchise choice. Start with the worst date in London and proceed from there.