Reviews
“Historically and culturally revelatory and poignantly emotional, but also intensely sexually explicit and disturbing.”
Kirkus Review
Roman Ivory by Robert Bruegmann is a triumph of LGBTQ historical fiction. An in depth plot rendered with magnificent description and detail. The richness of the time period, the depth of the characters, all surrounded by a puzzle to be solved and understandings of ones self to deepen and grow with a splash of mystery and suspense make this an excellent read. As I read I kept saying to myself, this is real, this is what it must have been like for the wealthy and the poor gay men of England, France, and Italy, as it tells the stories of how they lived, the secrets and the trysts, the satisfactions, triumphs and the heartbreak and tragedy as a gay life so often was and still can be. This book is a triumph of gay story telling, what our lives were like for a segment of the population back in the day pre the trial of Oscar Wilde; the fear, the hiding, the joys, the triumphs, happiness stolen from the persecution, overt and covert, from the world, from police, family, and society in general, and the jealousy and fear emanating from those who we thought were on our side. It's a story about the rich and artistic along with the young, penniless, and desperate, all looking for a chance, maybe for love, maybe for a few moments of warmth and affection, real or paid for. It is a story about the human heart and our hopes and fears, longings and desires, conventional and unconventional, all rendered with an eye for depth and detail of setting and character that insists we are reading about what it must have been like for those living at the time I really liked this book. I felt I was in that time and in those places. Excellent! This is gay historical fiction at its very best.
Mark Richard Zubro
Author of Ring of Silence and 21 other works of gay fiction
Crisp chapters recreate the urban and social landscapes of nineteenth-century London, Paris, and Rome, told through a story of homosexual romance, connoisseurship, and murder. Robert Bruegmann has melded a lifetime of personal and professional experience into parallel tales of self-discovery.
Christopher Mead
Emeritus Regents’ Professor, University of New Mexico
Author of Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera
The core of this fascinating book is an exploration of relationships, with a focus on the sexual dynamics of men loving men. The story unfolds against gripping evocations of social and cultural life in later nineteenth-century London, Paris and Rome.