Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth

A sultry book about first love, desire, and growing up in a small Irish community.

What happens in your bones and your heart when you’re with a person? If there’s heat and fire: you have a duty to follow that.

But also, when you realise you experience desire differently from those around you: how do you cope with the feelings that come with that? What if the fire feels like it will singe you? What if being gay is only just decriminalised?

The novel engages with compulsory heterosexuality and intersections between sexual desire, platonic love, and community.

On one level, Sunburn is a beautiful love story. On another, it is a moving exploration of community and of how, when you’re young, things can seem set in stone, only for you to realise that it’s really the people and feelings that endure.

Sunburn is about burning away all the excess until only what’s essential remains, yet it’s also a reference to Susannah’s body that Lucy cannot scrub from her mind. The book is great at tracing desire in little moments and seemingly innocent looks, and the sickening weight of guilty desires and secrets.

Lucy’s desire for Susannah is described with great beauty, but there is also frustration in the novel, moments where things don’t progress, or where difficult choices are made, but that feels very true to life and to how people live. Martin, another love interest, is also beautifully realised as the decent and loving “boy next door” set up against the glamorous but brittle “girl in the big house”. This is no facile or straightforward narrative.

Set in the early 1990s, the book is shaped by its Irish setting and the influence of Catholicism at the time. While there is some exploration of sin, it never feels like a dark novel. Instead, it consistently centres love and desire but with an engaging, sometimes naive & frustrating, innocence.

Ultimately, Sunburn is a powerful, lyrical book about both yearning and the fulfilment of desires.

Read it if you want to escape into yearning and young romance, or return to young summers of love.