09/01/2026
CONFLUENCE is an intimate and deeply moving q***r coming-of-age novel that evokes ’50s small-town life and the surprisingly wild pre-Stonewall ’60s.
In 1956, lonely teenager Teddy is drawn to the water and woods surrounding his small town, where he meets bad boy Wade and becomes overwhelmed by his attraction to him. During the rapturous early period of their friendship, the two range over the area’s mountains and waterways before falling out after high school over Teddy’s s*xuality. In the years following their separation, Teddy—now going by Ted—struggles to live openly as a gay man, finding and losing lovers at parties, dance clubs, and cruising spots in a surprisingly wild pre-Stonewall gay Vancouver. He is befriended by a lively crew of eccentrics—a new chosen family—who aid him in finding fulfillment both as a gay man and as an artist. Returning to his hometown nearly a decade later, Ted must decide whether or not to reunite with the one who once meant so much to him: the s*xy and mercurial Wade.
CONFLUENCE is a collaboration between late author Alex Turner and his husband, Lucian Childs (). Drawing on his sixty-year history with his beloved West Coast home, Turner wrote much of this beautifully rendered novel before he passed away in 2019. Childs, an award-winning author himself, completed the work, a novel that is simultaneously poetic, humorous, and exuberantly down to earth.
🌟 “A gushing hot spring of a novel, swirling with s*x, self-discovery, and stories that bubble up to insist on being told. In its pages, gay men find community—and communion—through honouring the desires that bind them across vast distances of geography and time.” —Matthew J. Trafford, author of RUNS IN THE BLOOD
Available now in Canada and the US. Get your copy from your favourite local bookstore, or order direct from Arsenal Pulp Press: https://arsenalpulp.com/Books/C/Confluence
