When the London theatres closed due to plague in the late 1590s, a still-young William Shakespeare composed and published ‘Venus and Adonis’, a poem about unrequited love, lust, and devotion to beauty. Shakespeare evokes a desire to touch, to kiss, to smell, to taste, to share breath. Christos Tsiolkas’s book 7½ (2021), written and published under similar circumstances, embodies some of this Shakespearean spirit, but his conception of beauty extends to a fuller range of sensual experience, accommodating everything that is human and alive – the stench as well as the perfume – while rejecting whatever seeks to diminish beauty and liveliness. It is the work of a writer who is in love with this world, despite its cruelties. The In-Between mirrors and extends that sensibility.

‘Perry is going on a date. The word itself strikes him as ridiculous, inappropriate for a man of his age. But if he were not to call it a date, then what the hell was it?’ So begins a novel of love, lust, and courage in the wake of rejection and betrayal. At first, we don’t know why or how Perry lost his former lover, Gerard, but we are informed that the split ‘resulted in the unexpected pain that has wearied him over the last few years’. Perry is trying to emerge from paralysis, to seek out connection in post-pandemic Melbourne. He has been bruised, almost destroyed, but he is willing to try again. That is why he is going to dinner with a man he has never met.