At Certain Points We Touch

At Certain Points We Touch is a novel by Lauren J. Joseph, published by Bloomsbury in 2022.

The narrator is coming home from a club in the small hours when they realise that the day is the twenty-ninth of February, which was the birthday of Thomas James. A decade has passed since the two of them fell into bed together in the summer they finished university, and the affair that followed ran for years, moving between London, San Francisco and New York, gathering other people into it as it went. The relationship was as much about power as about desire, and the narrator does not make themselves look well in the retelling. The book is their attempt to assemble it from memory, letters and art, written to somebody who can no longer read it.

The book moves between London, San Francisco and New York, and the narrator's account of the years in between is addressed to Thomas James himself.