A Year of Awakening (Love in a Changing Climate)

Why should it matter to me that there was going to be a good-looking, charming gay boy around the office? I was forty-two, for God's sake and had nothing to offer a young man like that, even if I was prepared to do anything about my sexuality. Which I was not. Because we all knew what the outcome of that would be. So there. End of subject.

Prickly, irascible and totally dedicated to his environmental consultancy business, Steve Frazer has no time for hook-ups or relationships; they belong to the past, to another life that he left behind two decades ago. Consequently, his powerful attraction to a new recruit, bright, funny, out-and-proud Josh Ashcroft, is an unwelcome emotion.

Initially the two men clash badly. Steve's attempts to rein in his feelings make him seem cruel and intolerant. Josh, battling the pressures of his first major job, struggles to cope with his boss's harshness. Yet despite this, the two men are drawn to each other...

Their burgeoning relationship awakens painful memories for both men. If they are to have a future together, they need to shed the baggage of the past and reclaim their lives. Is that possible? And how will Steve cope with a family bereavement that draws him back home to the village he has not seen for twenty years, since the events that drove him to a solitary, loveless existence?

Chris Cheek was born and brought up in South London. He has strong family ties with northern England and is a graduate of Lancaster University. He and his husband, Michael, have been together for over forty years and live on the Sussex Coast having moved recently from the Yorkshire Dales after 25 years. After a lifelong career in public transport, Chris returned in 2017 to the fiction writing he had first begun at the age of 17 in 1968. He writes a regular blog which can be found at chrischeek.me