The backstory behind Love, Leda, daring queer fiction unearthed 51 years after its author’s suicide aged 32, holds enough intrigue that one might half-expect the actual product to fall short. By no means. Mark Hyatt’s only completed novel has been brought to fruition by a small, dedicated group including publishers Peninsula Press, various archivists of marginal British poets (Hyatt had poetry published before and after his death), and close friends who retained copies of his drafts through the decades, and it’s an evocative, often powerful time capsule of a clandestine subculture.

No-one knows exactly when Love, Leda was written, but it certainly predates the UK’s legalisation of homosexuality in 1967 – in other words, much of what Hyatt’s protagonist and narrator Leda embarks on herein was an arrestable offence, and may well have made an unexpurgated print tricky. Leda himself contains multitudes, some of which might have airs of gay stereotypes (alternately narcissistic and self-hating; poetically-minded and hungry for base pleasures) but always with a counterpoint in his personality. His sexuality, too, is less than linear: occasional, functional liaisons with women likely having a touch of autobiography, if Hyatt’s own life is an indicator.

Further satisfaction is found in the passages of dialogue – urbane rallies of quick wit, indicating Hyatt had unfulfilled designs on the theatre – and Love, Leda’s portrayal of a stratum of 1960s London that both stands apart from the picture-postcard Carnaby Street image and, in a way, helped bring that into existence.