A Clean Finish Wins The Race: Gay British Literary Rowing Romance

In the tradition of Hollinghurst, Baldwin and Bret Easton Ellis. Raw. Unapologetic. Unfiltered.

Between the candlelit halls of Silverbourne Manor and the riverside bars of West London, two rowers and a fundraiser are about to discover that love rarely follows a clean line.

Finn is late, jealous, and driving away from his family's ancient Oxfordshire estate when he realises Aly has already started without him. Aly, naturally, is already flirting. And Brian, charming, anxious and entirely unprepared, is about to have the most unexpectedly life-changing year of his life.

What begins as a chance meeting at a Putney fundraiser becomes something none of them quite know how to name. From the boathouses of the Thames to a hot tub in the Oxfordshire countryside, from a windswept afternoon on the Avon Gorge to a quiet kitchen at midnight and a departure board reading Zürich, the three of them navigate old money and no money, jealousy in its subtler forms, and a grief that refuses to announce itself. Brian carries the memory of a soldier who left without warning. Finn carries an 800-year-old house that will never quite be his. Aly carries the exhausting business of pretending, most days, that he isn't in love with both of them.

Set against the rituals of a British rowing season, from early autumn erg sessions in South West London to the champagne rituals of Henley Royal Regatta, this is a story about class and belonging, about the strange freedoms of a throuple, and about the terrifying possibility that this might be more than just fun.

Witty, warm and unapologetically heated, A Clean Finish Wins the Race opens the Silverbourne series: a debut novel about three very different men who stop pretending they don't want the same thing.

Fourth Edition, fully revised. Contains explicit scenes; heated chapters are clearly labelled for readers who prefer to skip them. Entirely human-written, with full editing provenance independently logged and documented.

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A commitment to Human Authorship: the illustrations are hand-drawn in coloured pencil and Japanese sumi ink, and the writing is entirely human, with no generative tools involved at any stage. All of my recent titles are published with documented provenance, keystroke records among it, giving each book a verifiable authorship history at a moment when that has become worth stating plainly.