Minor is the desiring body that runs, rises, gravitates towards larger, brighter, more dazzling bodies, that bestows on other bodies the status of suns and planets, fires to be orbited, the reason for everything. There is no centre of the universe except the one we invent for ourselves.
Jonathan is twenty years old, gay, and full of life. He's set out to escape the insignificance of his suburban home, to give himself instead and forever to the real city, Milan, where he hopes also to find love.
But when Jonathan finds love in all its messy, complicated, sexy reality, it is not enough. He has escaped the place and people of his childhood, but can he escape the man raised by those people and in that place, the man he has grown up to be?
Praise for Fever-
'Jagged and tender, forthright and sly, this book felt so committed to its fierce, wise vision of the joys and terrors of having a body and living a life. It tells us real things, in a rich voice, with force and passion and insight. I couldn't put it down.'
-Ronnie Scott, author of The Adversary
'Bazzi captures the longing, the wounds, and the joys of growing up queer and working class in 1980s Milan - and what it means to recalibrate your world amid the aftershocks of a life-changing diagnosis. I read it in a single sitting.'
-Jennifer Down, author of Bodies of Light
'I couldn't put it down. Jonathan Bazzi's writing is immensely powerful.'
-Tomasz Jedrowski, author of Swimming in the Dark