Second Person

Second Person is Celyn Beynon's side of Undefined Terms: an opposites-attract queer romance with a non-binary lead, told by Celyn, a Welsh writer in Manchester, about falling for site manager Ron Carrick, and a companion novel to Book 2 of The Carrick Brothers that can be read on its own. It is not a sequel.

You watch them work. It does not occur to you that they are watching back.

Celyn comes to Manchester at twenty with one bag and a name chosen on the train somewhere past Chester. It means holly, a plant that stays green when everything around it gives up. Back in Beddgelert, the family keeps using the old one.

Rhi teaches them the wing of an eyeliner on her bedroom floor, in a flat above a charity shop on Oldham Street. A restaurant pays the rent. At the corner table of a Northern Quarter bar, Celyn writes a horror novel and watches the room.

Every other week for eight months, the same big, silent stranger takes the same stool at the counter, lets his pint go flat and never once crosses the floor. Celyn has filled a notebook with his hands before ever learning his name.

Ron told this story in Undefined Terms, one load-bearing word at a time. He never knew the corner table was watching back. Here is everything he couldn't see from the counter: the rules Celyn reads out at their own table, and Ron hearing them as a door rather than a dare; the seminar where the pages go round; Easter in a kitchen in Beddgelert; and what it costs to be looked at all day and seen by almost nobody.

Celyn's side of the slowest burn in Manchester: funnier, sharper and closer to the bone.

Second Person and Unstated Premise are the Missing Terms: the two companion novels of The Carrick Brothers, each telling one of the main books again from the other side.

Good to know

• Reading order: not a sequel. It covers the same story as Book 2, Undefined Terms, from Celyn's side; it can be read alone and is much better after it.
• Point of view: Celyn only, first person, moving between present and past. Despite the title, it is not written in the second person.
• Heat: open door and explicit, between consenting adults, with the boundaries said out loud.
• Ending: happy ever after, no cliffhanger.
• Length: a full-length novel of about 60,000 words, in British English.