A bestseller in France and highly acclaimed by the

press when published in Britain, Sweet Tooth is one of

those gay novels with a universal appeal to anyone

with a strong enough stomach to take its frankness,

bruiality and imaginative power, because it is also a

horror story.

Luc, a young Frenchman, flies to New York to see

his dying ex-lover, and during his stay discovers the

tough and seamy realities of that city of night with its

anonymous gay encounters in parking lots, its

muggings, its often sado-masochistic couplings in

cockroach infested apartments, its casual murders, its

lust and occasional discovery of love, Sweet Tooth is

also the odyssey of Lucy, a widow whose grief has led

her into one of the weirdest of bizarre passions, and

she increasingly frequents funeral parlours where one

pays for a few furtive moments alone with the dead, a

passion that leads to her own macabre destruction.

But Sweet Tooth is also the work of a real writer,

who can handle the most horrifying situations with

style and elegance, whose eye and car accurately

catches the underlife of New York and the strange

characters who live there, where everyone becomes

his own assassin."

Navarre was born in France in 1940 of an old

Gascon family. His novels and plays have made him

one of the most discussed and read French authors of

the last decade. The faithful and idiomatic translation

is by Donald Watson, one of the most experienced

translators of modern fiction and drama.