A few years ago, I had a crush on my best friend. I remember the panic, of beginning to suspect that these feelings might be something more than friendship, the desperate need to pretend that I wasn’t falling in love with someone who was then presenting as the same gender. I remember the tension and the yearning, the way that they became the centre of my universe and later I the centre of theirs.

Reading Abbey Lay’s debut novel, Lead Us Not, plunged me back into those memories, because of how vividly it captures the irresistible obsessiveness of first (queer) love and the claustrophobic impact of internalised homophobia.