This is a brilliant, uncompromising novel by one of the early innovators of gay literature. Anonymous sexual encounters and unbridled lust slowly merge into love in this stunning work from a legend of quality gay literature. Hubert Selby Jr.'s Brooklyn. Charles Bukowski's Los Angeles. Henry Miller's Paris. Gritty, brutal and uncompromising - and all drawn from the same lines as Yves Navarre's New York, a city of muggings, cockroach-infested apartments, dank hospitals and casual murder. Strip-lights flickering in subterranean parking lots; overcrowded subways sweaty with the possibility of violence; averted faces, dark alleys, the pale green skin of a junkie in his last cold turkey. Scrawny backstreet cats fighting amongst overflowing garbage cans, the hard sounds of sex and rage rattling off fire escapes, smeared windows, stained and crowded walls. This is New York way before zero tolerance, way before 9/11, when Broadway was still dangerous and the city was crammed with fear and beauty. Into its sooty mouth walks Luc, a French visitor whose life collides with those of Rasky and Lucy in a series of raw encounters as sensual and sensory as the tastes of the city itself. From his disconcerting arrival at Customs to Navarre's incredible, macabre ending, every step of Luc's odyssey is recounted with shocking candour and spectacular detail. The unheralded precursor of a mainstream canon and one of the most influential gay novels ever written, "Sweet Tooth" is an awesome work from a writer of incomparable talent.