Nothing Ever Just Disappears is about what happens to a house or a room, or a whole town or city, when it is transformed by a powerful sensibility. With originality and subtlety, Diarmuid Hester examines how the gay imagination deals with place and with displacement, allowing for mystery and a kind of magic

Fascinating journeys into LGBTQ+ courage… Hester is attentive to atmosphere, as influenced by both culture and community, and how it acts on individual lives, sometimes expanding horizons and sometimes restricting them… Throughout, Nothing Ever Just Disappears celebrates the courage it took for these queer people merely to exist, and exist honestly, in a hostile world

Remarkable and expansive… Intrinsic to the power and beauty of this book are Hester’s own voice, story and powers of imagination… tremendously absorbing… The great gift of this book is to offer access to optimism, in these late and shadowed days. It provides a glimpse, a possibility for transformation, and an escape from the closed and shuttered spaces of late capitalism; and it suggests that we may be able to save ourselves by rethinking our lives and imaginations, our societies and systems – by queering our world

A revelatory look at queer culture… imaginative and engrossing… fresh, spry… a resolutely unpretentious prose style – sometimes animatedly conversational, sometimes wonderfully camp – goes hand in hand with scholarliness

Intriguing and idiosyncratic… a very lively and readable book that shows the ways in which outsiders have created interfaces, of variable permeability, with the society in which they lived

Riveting and evocative… Written with infectious drive, Nothing Ever Just Disappears is considered, fascinating and sparkles with insight

Diarmuid Hester has written a book I have always wanted to read. An exploration, celebration and reclamation of queer lives within their spaces and landscapes, it roams from the cloisters and locked gates of Cambridge to the hilly streets of San Francisco, the apartments of New York City and the nuclear desert of Dungeness's shingle-shore, where Derek Jarman created a world on the margins and of the margins. Hester is a fizzingly brilliant writer, and with its fusion of personal testimony, reportage, cultural history and literary criticism, this book will surely find a wide readership

A moving, erudite book. Writing against the tide of erasure, Hester takes us on a journey through time, over land and sea, and casts an empathetic and sharply humorous eye on this pantheon of queer figures. A hymn to the importance of community and place, this is a vital public history of queer life that is both intimate and wondrously radical

Diarmuid Hester's beautifully written psycho-biography explores obscure corners of places as sites of hidden queer histories. His portraits of writers and activists from E.M. Forster to Josephine Baker, London's queer suffragettes and Kevin Killian are haunted and haunting - totally riveting

A charming, playfully challenging companion on a dreamy quest through lost landscapes of defiance, imagination and desire

Hester's book takes the reader on a beguiling journey from country to country. Full of extraordinary details, it delves deep into queer creative minds from the past, offering up a refreshingly original perspective on the human connection to sense of place

From Dungeness to San Francisco, the motley wildness of these gay pioneers is told with fitting zest by Hester. I loved it

Hester's book is insightful, delightful, and enlightening: an essential entrant into the queer canon

Lightly, yet seriously, Hester's immersive prose takes us on a journey that colourfully loops together the transgressive with the political. Heady descriptions of varied queer lives are rooted in the materiality of vividly conjured places. A ‘flummox of friends’ comes to life as their stories mix, mingle and collide. Stirring, thoughtful and gorgeously fun to read

Nothing Ever Just Disappears is a book I have longed for without knowing I was missing, much like the vanished or vanishing queer spaces Hester evokes so vividly in its pages. Deftly, beautifully, it performs an enchanting queering of literary tourism and artists' house studies, from failures of epiphany we all experience in places that we expect to move us, to awkwardness about how best to honour our creative forebears in all their human complexity. It is both a much needed and engaging history of queer creative lives and their places, complicating notions of sites of production and dwelling as ’secular shrines’, and a moving memoir of Hester’s own creative geographies: the places and people that matter to him and have informed his own thinking. This book, as Hester writes, ‘is ritual’ - both pilgrimage in its writing and its reading. Once you have gazed into the convex mirror, you can’t unsee the resplendent queer world you encounter there

A charismatic, dazzling piece of work that has the feel of a future classic. Shadows at Noon is remarkably rich and full of life, packed with insights conveyed through beautifully moving storytelling. A unique and vital book, it is at once incredibly informative, profound and very readable - a genuine page-turner

Both erudite and intimate, Chatterji narrates how South Asia in the twentieth century produced democracy and authoritarianism, inclusion and violent exclusion, all at the same time, explaining our present as well as giving us an account of the past

A tour de force of contemporary history of the Indian subcontinent. Its masterly analysis of the big picture - nationalisms, citizenship and the State - sets the stage for its innovative focus on ordinary people and their lives. A brilliant, wonderful read

This book's promise to deliver a 'people-centred history' of South Asia over the twentieth century is no small task. Chatterji's epic work meanders across this huge terrain, taking a series of imaginative angles such as the histories of the household, music, film and food, as well as many others. Combining scholarly rigour with a spontaneous tone and autobiographical style, this is a courageous and captivating work

A historical epic in prose - masterly, original, provocative - and, yes, compellingly readable

[A] bold, innovative and personal work rallies against standard narratives of ‘inherent’ differences between India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and reveals the many things its people have in common