"Like (the German writer W.G.) Sebald, Levin pays meticulous attention to small, everyday details - smells, tastes, body definitions, even the design of shoes - and uses them as hooks upon which to hang troubled, fractured memories. These deceptively simple, poetic stories invite any number of readings under post-colonial, gay, Jewish theories of literature. By turns enlightening and frustrating, Levin amplifies big themes by way of personal, tiny moments."

Shaun Levin’s prose is so taut, his images so vivid, that it feels as if he’s talking right to you, and even shouting sometimes. This is a collection where, at last, sex is given its rightful place as both a celebration and a comfort. Many of the stories benefit from the writer’s own journeying as a gay man through South Africa, Israel, America and the UK, although Levin manages to write equally convincingly about that disjointed time when a nursing mother wonders who her body belongs to. For all their themes of dislocation, conflict, identity, home in all its meanings, at the heart of these stories (like those of Chekhov, a writer Levin plays tribute to) is the one thing that matters. Love.

Sarah Salway

A South African who has lived in Israel and who is now based in London, Shaun Levin, prefaces his debut short-story collection with an epigraph from Robert Mapplethorpe: "It was a good place to come from, in that it was a good place to leave."
This certainly hits the home key, as it's rare to find a collection so resolutely centred on a single concern: that is, uprootedness, the anguished wrench between "was" and "is".
Nearly all the 16 stories here have to do with gay experience, and most explore Jewish identity (though there's surprisingly little on the interface between the two; if lovers first meet at a Purim party in Jaffa, that's just circumstantial detail).
Many of the stories explore the function of memory; for example, the title piece, on an adolescent's last summer in South Africa and his first in Israel, after his family emigrates. The South African memories are paradigmatic: the closeness of the boy to Grace, the family's black domestic help, and his realisation, now, of the distance that had always existed between them.
Everything is Like Sweets plays with Denis Hirson's "I Remember" formula ("I remember my grandfather spending long stretches of time in the toilet reading Louis L'Amour"). A road accident, an X-ray, the discovery of a fish-hook lodged in the narrator's chest, release a flow of interlocking memories of the day the hook was swallowed. This is a peculiarly unsettling piece, pervaded by the sense of something threatening, unseen, behind the screen.
"Unsettling", indeed, fits many of the stories here, detached in tone but opening unexpectedly into sudden shafts of stress and pain. In a piece that remains for the most part very self-controlled, the narrator suddenly insists: "I can't imagine touching your body now. Just the thought of your sour smell makes me want to be sick." (This story, Nine Lives, is one of the best in the book, and that means it's very good indeed).
Often Levin will illuminate a crisis of one kind by exploring another, as in the appropriately titled Permanent Distraction. Another of the strongest pieces, The Death of Others, is a complex exploration of multiple emotional ruptures among members of an extended family: like so much of the material in the book, on the surface low-key but acutely painful.
The great majority of the stories are told through first-person narration, which enables Levin direct access to his characters' emotional and psychological stress. Yet, if all this makes A Year of Two Summers sound unremittingly bleak, this is offset by the quality of the writing and by the inclusion of some pieces that buck the general trend.
Shoes, for example, is a genial story exploring the life of a young cross-dresser - one of a number of pieces set, vividly, in Tel Aviv or in the southern Israeli town of Ashkelon.
That Summer Before the Army, on a youth's first experience of oral sex, comes close to soft porn (it did, after all, appear in an anthology called My First Time, and Levin at one point ran a gay erotica writing workshop in London).
There is some mordant humour, as when, in a story set in the US, one narrator details the bizarre hobby of an especially macho character: "A Barbie collection does not go down well in major-league football circles."
In A Born King of Something Levin subverts the format of a job interview to have the narrator let out all sorts of private things, and while in The Last South African the undercurrent is sombre enough, as first-person narration bursts disruptively into third, there is a scandalous - and delightful - narrative twist.
Professor and Mrs Painter is a conventional piece set in New York, centred round a mother/son relationship and with strong echoes of the work of David Leavitt (he of Lost Language of Cranes fame and the author of some marvellous short stories). Though comparisons may be odious, I'd say this one's as good as Leavitt at his best.
Finally, in The Sweet Thing, Levin allows himself to edge, quite unexpectedly, to an upbeat ending. Set in London's theatre-land, this one stretches credulity, but it does demonstrate that, as well as giving sharp insight into states of alienation, Levin can do tenderness, take risks and has considerable range.

Chris Dunton