NATIONAL BESTSELLER
The New Yorker
Best Books of 2025
Publishers Weekly
Top 10 Books of the Year
A Recommended Book in the
Washington Post
, the
New York Times
Style Magazine
,
Observer
W Magazine
NBC News, E! Online, Queerty
Literary Hub, Stylist,
&
Dazed
From the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of
Gay Bar
comes a rule-breaking, sweat-soaked, genre-busting story of outlaw love.
It’s 1996, and Jeremy Atherton Lin has met the boy of his dreams — a mumbling, starry-eyed Brit — just as, amid a media frenzy, US Congress prepares the Defense of Marriage Act, denying same-sex couples federal rights including immigration. The pair steals away to remote forests and vast deserts, London fashion shows and Berlin sex clubs, dinner parties, back alleys, East Village hotel rooms, and San Francisco dives. Finding no other way to stay together, they shack up illicitly among unlikely allies in a “city of refuge.”
With Atherton Lin’s inimitable blend of tenderness and wicked humor,
Deep House
moves through the couple’s string of rented apartments while unlocking doors to a lineage of gay men who have come before — smuggling a foreign partner through national checkpoints or going public to stand up for the right to get down in the privacy of their own homes. They include hapless criminals, sexpot bartenders, friars, pirates, government workers who subverted the system, activists who went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the celebrated artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres.
Following
— called “a rich tapestry” by
Vanity Fair
and “an absolute tour de force” by Maggie Nelson —
juxtaposes whispered disclosures of undocumented domesticity with courtroom drama and political stunts to explore myriad forms of intimacy while questioning the mechanisms that legitimize love.
is at once a historical kaleidoscope and the innermost tale of two boyfriends who made a home in the shadows of a turbulent civil rights battle.