The long-awaited new novel from
AUTHOR OF
The World of Normal Boys
You Can Say You Knew Me When
AND Robin and Ruby
PRAISE FOR ARMY OF LOVERS
"It’s nearly impossible to resist novels about young artists moving to the big city, and Army of Lovers is no different. The New York that Paul arrives in is cheap enough to afford an apartment, one he can furnish with scrap furniture and an 'embryonic CD collection,' but the price is violent homophobia in the streets and a government hell-bent on letting his community die. Paul may have arrived fresh-faced and naive, but he grows up at lightning speed as those in his community literally fight for their lives. ... this is a novel that delivers on literature’s great themes of love and loss..."
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
"In this stunning return to form, Soehnlein's brilliant novel of love, sex, social activism, and sobering loss will incite nostalgia, pride, and a fierce sense of queer solidarity...a memorable, character-driven story..."
BAY AREA REPORTER
"Army of Lovers tells a story of resistance...The novel possesses the immediacy of memoir...The first-person storytelling packs a punch...the book bristles with urgent energy..."
EDGE MEDIA NETWORK
“Soehnlein delivers a sprawling portrait of our darkest days, capturing all the anger and heartbreak and heroic love that forged who we are today. If you want to know how it felt, read this.”
ARMISTEAD MAUPIN
“In this vivid novel set in 1980s New York, the stakes could not be higher. While facing down monoliths like the FDA and the Catholic Church, Paul must navigate the ordinary desires, anxieties, and heartbreaks of youth. Drawn from the author’s lived experiences and rich with yearning and tenderness, Army of Lovers is a must-read for anyone searching for agency in an indifferent world. The story of ACT UP remains strikingly relevant today, and K.M. Soehnlein is just the writer to tell it.”
ALIA VOLZ
Author of Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana,
and the Stoning of San Francisco
“Just when a moment in history is about to be forgotten, an author comes along to capture its passions and struggles and hope. Soehnlein has performed that magic for readers here. Army of Lovers will become essential reading for years to come. Read it now; be moved, enraptured, emboldened, and reminded what it was like to be young at a turning point in history.”
ANDREW SEAN GREER
Pulitzer Prize winning author of Less Is Lost
“Army of Lovers comes at a crucial time, when the most devastating years of the AIDS era are sometimes remembered only for their despair and not for the love and action that brought so many changes. An evocative and beautiful book that reminds us of the deepest power of witness — which can help us find our lost ones again through the precious telling of their stories.”
MANUEL MUÑOZ
Author of The Consequences
“his novel is a stunning act of remembering. It’s a visceral re-creation of the sights, sounds, smells, the feel of Manhattan from Wall Street to Times Square in the late 1980s and early ’90s. The bars, parks, restaurants, apartments. Parties and sex parties. The meeting halls where ACT UP New York met. The touch of friends and lovers and comrades, in street actions and crowded jail cells. The taste of ash in your mouth, literal ash, ashes of the dead. ”
JOHN WEIR
Author of The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket
“Army of Lovers is astonishing, devastating, a small time-machine made of words, a survivor’s novel, a queer coming-of-age story — collective by necessity and also deeply particular — one perfect tear-stained facet of the kaleidoscopic scene that was ACT UP/Queer Nation in early ‘90s New York. I was there, I knew these people, I wanted it never to end.”
ANDREA LAWLOR
Author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl