I Am Not Raymond Wallace, Sam Kenyon
Manhattan, 1963: weeks before the assassination of President Kennedy, fresh-faced Raymond Wallace lands in the New York Times newsroom on a three-month bursary from Cambridge University. He soon discovers his elusive boss, Bukowski, is being covertly blackmailed by an estranged wife, and that he himself is to assist the straight-laced Doty on an article about the ‘explosion of overt homosexuality’ in the city. On an undercover assignment, a secret world is revealed to Raymond: a world in which he need no longer pretend to be something or someone he cannot be; a world in which he meets Joey.
Like so many men of his time and of his kind, Raymond faces a choice between conformity, courage and compartmentalisation. The decision he makes will ricochet destructively through lives and decades until—in another time, another city; in Paris, 2003—Raymond’s son Joe finally meets Joey. And the healing begins.
I am not Raymond Wallace is a multi-stranded story of queer redemption spanning multiple generations, told with precision-tooled prose, sharply-imagined settings and compassionately-observed characterisation.
Sam Kenyon reading from I Am Not Raymond Wallace
It’s our pleasure to bring you I Am Not Raymond Wallace by debut author Sam Kenyon. This is the story of a generation of queer men seeking a community, kinship, love, acceptance, and ultimately redemption.
This podcast is edited and produced by Megan Bay Dorman, and programmed by Matt Casbourne.
Damian Barr’s Literary Salon is where the freshest debuts and the biggest bestsellers read for the first time from their latest greatest books and share their own personal stories.
Enjoy the Literary Salon podcast's Book of the Week where each bite-sized episode offers an exclusive taster of a new book. World premieres include Douglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain, Maddie Mortimer's Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies and Maggie O'Farrell's The Marriage Portrait. You're going to love it.
Hosted by writer and broadcaster, Damian Barr, produced and edited by Megan Bay Dorman and programmed by Matt Casbourne.
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