My Only Boy

by Rosa Rankin-Gee

She had a plan for everything except him…

When a desperate worker throws himself off a balcony, it is Elle who has handle the fallout. Comms director for a tech start-up firm called Gigr, which finds casual employment for an increasingly wide range of workers and professionals, it is her job to anticipate and plan for every scenario.

But lately events have started to spin out of her control.

In parliament the political temperature is getting as hot as the weather on the streets outside. If Elle is to ensure her company’s smooth path towards a stock market floatation – a floatation that will provide her and her family with the financial security they so desperately need – she must be prepared to bend to the will of the new extremists in government.

n Elle’s personal life, things are hardly less complicated.

On an evening so hot that London’s pavements seem to melt, she meets Ed at a house party and immediately the conversation flows. Each exchange feels like an new adventure. It’s inevitable that they fall in love.

But Elle has dated only women for as long as she can remember and Ed is a writer billed as ‘the great gay novelist of our times.’

Can the unexpected attraction Ed and Elle feel for each other last when it presents such a profound challenge to their identity?

And what happens when their sense of self collapses alongside the world around them?

Set over the course of an historic year, My Only Boy is both a once-in-a-lifetime love story and an uncompromising state-of-the-nation thriller that asks universal questions about the compromises we are prepared to make and the lengths to which we are prepared to go obtain the things we desire most.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

464 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 21, 2026

About the author

Hi! My name is Rosa.

I've written four novels and am working on my fifth, mostly at a McDonalds in Delhi, NY.

My first THE LAST KINGS OF SARK won Shakespeare and Company's Paris Literary Prize.

My second DREAMLAND has just been made into a 6-part drama for the BBC.

My third BACHELORETTES, is a romcom based on how I met wife, for Audible.

And my fourth, MY ONLY BOY, is coming out in May this year.

I live with my wife and our newborn daughter Mara in between a few different places, including the Catskills, the East Village and whenever I'm allowed to get back: England.

Reviews

[Jodie Matthews · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s incredibly rare for a book to make me tear up, but the end of My Only Boy got me. A love story set against the backdrop of a shock election that leads Britain further into far right extremism, My Only Boy tells a story that is huge in scope whilst honing in one two people.
Elle works at a dubious gig-economy start up, fighting PR fires and bringing in good money in exchange for covering up scandals. Their workers (because of course they aren’t actual employees) are horrifically underpaid, overworked, and abused on the streets. Her rebound relationship with Marion, after her heartbreak with Bonnie, has ended a few weeks ago, and things at work are going from bad to worse.
Ed is a writer, the next big voice in gay literature, with a novel that’s just been published and a new one he needs to write somehow.

When Ed and Elle meet at a party, just after another huge scandal/traumatic event occurs at Elle’s work, they both find themselves drawn to each other, in a way that neither of them have been to people of the opposite gender. As the country melts around them in an extreme heatwave, the streets become more violent, and the government leans further and further right, Elle & Ed are juggling falling in love & fighting the loss of their identities & communities. This is a gorgeous, vivid state of the nation novel that doesn’t go in the direction you expect at all. Rankin-Gee is so sharp on politics, identity, capitalism, and sexuality – My Only Boy is brimming with ideas, each handled deftly. Beneath the love story (or stories, there’s a few wonderful relationship portrayals here) there is a scary lesson to learn about the quick and easy decline of this country – how easy it easy to let things slide, how quickly they build up, how dangerous it is to give the right wing even an inch. That said, by choosing to put a love story at the centre of this story, Rankin-Gee shows us the ways in which the world, and people, continue to move in the face of adversity. She shows all the different forms that love can take, how we can keep moving forward through it all with love. And how it’s worth fighting for. To paraphrase Ed and Elle, ‘what more is happening than love?’

[Diana · Rating 4 out of 5]

This entire thing is so meta, but I think this was one of the rare books that fits the “forbidden love” label. On paper, it’s the most standard, least forbidden of love stories: girl meets boy and falls in love. No external circumstances prevent them from dating. It’s just two straight white people dating.
Except, neither of them is straight - main character Elle has only ever been attracted to women and has in fact just been dumped by what she sees as the love of her life, and the new object of her affection, Ed, uses “the new great gay novelist” as the tagline on his books. Them suddenly discovering that they’re bi and entering a “conventional” straight relationship is the most subversive, controversial thing that’s ever happened to them.

To make matters worse, the Britain in this book is in the midst of political breakdown and a new far right government is on its way to erase any and all progress we’ve made in terms of LGBT rights, so to turn “straight” at a time like this, isn’t it a betrayal of their community? (You’ll notice I haven’t shelved this as speculative/ dystopian fiction because I mean how far from contemporary is this really 🫠)
And in meta terms, in this day and age isn’t it more subversive to write a story like this than to write the opposite, straight people discovering they might be gay/ bi?

This love story is one focal point of the novel, the other is Elle’s job: she’s the communications director for a sort of Uber/ Deliveroo/ Taskrabbit startup on steroids. In this fictional world, the UK economy has collapsed to an extent that even policemen, nurses and the like need to work full extra shifts driving Ubers etc on top of their actual jobs and this startup is making that happen. Aka, reality in the US today lol. As someone who also works in one of the vampiric ultra capitalist industries, I loved having a protagonist who is not just very ambitious but also simply good at their job, even if the job is evil. Apart from Drayton and Mackenzie, I can’t remember ever reading a millennial novel where that’s the case.

It actually reminded me of Drayton and Mackenzie in another way too: My Only Boy is similarly 150-200 pages too long. Protagonist Elle also gets more and more unlikeable as time goes on; her job is breaking her down psychologically and ethically and that seeps into her private life more and more, but at some point she’s just being a complete asshole to her boyfriend, best friend, and family and we never get a resolution for that. The last 1/3-1/4 of the book, I became sick of Elle and that’s not a great place to be when you’re reading a novel written in first person. She’s meant to be a grey protagonist and is almost by default unlikeable because of what she does in her job, but towards the end it became exhausting and over the top. And while the initial love story was electric, at some point it devolved into two people just yapping, throwing one-liners back and forth.

So that’s the 5* gone unfortunately, but still, I read this so quickly and I feel it deserves props for creating a love story that feels real and complex in a very unique way.

[Lisa Jorge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful writing of relationships and exploration of feelings as always from one of my favourite authors. I always have to re-read whole pargaraphs because there is such depth and observation within them, it's luxurious to read.

The political climate would feel dystopian if I read this a few years ago, but yet again in her writing, Rankin-Gee shows us what's just around the corner. A depressingly astute observation of a potential 2027-28 Britain.

For me, My Only Boy missed the 5* mark as I felt it was missing some 'come-uppance' within the story. I love a flawed protagonist, and I know there will be natural consequences from her cgions, but I would have liked more growth, both from Elle herself, but for Ed and Luisa too, to hold her to account more for how she behaved with both of them.
I guess my justice sensitivity is activated a bit, I feel like they needed to have their say in order to really finish up the story. Maybe it was there in between the lines, but I was left wanting more for them both.

[Yana · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars?

"I remember thinking at the time: because I
am young, or at least not old, I haven’t been around a lot of death yet, so I have to
copy other voices. Whatever it was, I didn’t feel like myself."

Before page 300 or so: 5 stars and after: 3 stars. It's a shame I really liked this book.

I get that Elle was feeling lost and she was falling back to what she knew but come on. I don't mind morally ambiguous or cheating *in books*, but in a niche like this it didn't work for me.

[Jamad · Rating 2 out of 5]

My Only Boy is set in a near-future England that feels uncomfortably plausible. Climate breakdown, political instability and widening inequality have become part of everyday life, while a gig-economy giant called Gigr profits from the chaos. The story follows Elle, the company’s communications director, as she navigates a crumbling society, a complicated relationship with Ed, a prominent LGBTQ+ campaigner and author, and a series of increasingly questionable personal and professional decisions. As the country slides further into crisis, Elle finds herself drawn ever deeper into corporate corruption and moral compromise.

I enjoyed the beginning of this much more than the latter stages. Rankin-Gee creates a convincing vision of a Britain only a few steps removed from our own, where environmental disasters, political extremism and exploitative technology companies have become normalised. The setting felt sharp and believable, and there was plenty of dark humour woven through the bleakness.

Elle is not always an easy character to spend time with, but her brittle wit and cynical observations kept me turning the pages for quite a while. The novel asks interesting questions about identity, power and the compromises people make when institutions are failing around them. The romance at the heart of the story is also more unusual than it first appears.

Unfortunately, as the book went on I found it became a bit tiresome. The combination of corporate intrigue, ethical failings and relentless societal collapse gradually lost some of its impact, and by the final third I felt the story was circling the same ideas. The darkness and humour that worked so well early on seemed to cancel each other out rather than deepen the emotional stakes.

An okay read with an interesting premise and some sharp observations about where society could be heading, but one that ultimately outstayed its welcome for me.

[Mergulum · Rating 4 out of 5]

The main strand of the novel concerns the relationship between Elle and Ed who in principle are both gay but in practice seem to relate to each other like a fairly conventional heterosexual couple. But the wider context is of a Britain that has recently elected a far-right government and how that begins to impact on them and wider society. So Elle works for a tech company that facilitates the type of casual work that is attractive to irregular migrants which becomes of interest to the government. And the increasingly homophobic atmosphere impacts both directly and indirectly on Elle and Ed and their social and work circles. A particularly interesting aspect is how people who you would not expect to support the far-right find themselves in essence enabling that agenda. It also seems a very contemporary novel with such incidents as accidentally broadcasting a voice message over a Bluetooth speaker and referencing an upcoming IPO for Elle’s company. (I confess that I had to look up “IPO”.) So it does have a kind of resonance as a state of the nation piece. But as we haven’t yet elected a far-right government - if you don’t count Johnson and Truss - then maybe this is more of a warning on what the state of the nation could be. How effective such warnings are is I think open to doubt but I suppose that we do what we can. Thanks to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for this review copy.

[Dr M · Rating 5 out of 5]

For me her strongest book yet. Compelling and moving, politically astute, a brilliant analysis of how we live now, in the hands of billionaires and algorithms and with fascistic forces trying to overtake democracies, but still longing as individuals to love and be human. At first you only glimpse the machinery of a vast, greedy capitalism eating all the characters in the background, but all the way through, the power of the book gathers the reader in on two levels: what will happen in the unlikely event that a gay man, Ed, and a lesbian woman, Elle, fall deeply in love because their minds are souls and humour are attuned? - and how will Elle, who handles ‘disaster management’ for ‘Giggr’, manage to navigate the increasingly dehumanising demands of the giant she works for? Joys along the way are the perceptions, sharp, sparkling, original, of the physical world, and a constant sense of how fragile but how hungry bodies can be. It’s an anatomy of 21st-century anxiety - the condition of life for a post-9/11, post-COVID generation. And a tender, believable love story where many controversial issues of sexual and gender politics are fascinatingly worked through.

[Suki J · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to Scribner for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

3.75 stars.

Elle, a woman whose job it is to handle crises for Gigr, a company that finds casual work for a wide range of people, and also happens to be a lesbian, meets Ed, the 'great gay novelist of our times', and they find themselves falling for each other.
Set against their burgeoning relationship is the backdrop of a UK that has a recently elected coalition of far-right parties in charge. I found the political situation very interesting, and sadly not that different from where our current politics may end up in future, and would have loved more of a focus on that. The romance was interesting and moving, and I really liked the various side characters, I just felt maybe there were a few too many threads to the story to be fully invested.
Although I wasn't completely won over by the book, I think it's one that'll grow on me the more I think about it.

[Samira Shackle · Rating 5 out of 5]

is is an extraordinary book. This is a stylish literary thriller with a complex love story at its heart - between a gay woman and a gay man, who are both incredibly conflicted about the relationship and what it says about their identity. This plays out against the backdrop of rising fascism in the U.K., which is subtly and effectively rendered to horrifying effect as the central characters make moral compromises and grapple with how to live as the world collapses around them. The characters absolutely jump off the page, the writing is sharp and frequently hilarious. I was absolutely gripped and cannot recommend it highly enough.

[Vicky · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to the publisher for sending me an advance copy of My Only Boy in exchange for an honest review.

My Only Boy was a complicated read for me, and perhaps the book that has had the most profound effect on my so far this year. The concept is simple, but bold: what happens when a gay man and a lesbian discover they have feelings for one another? The relationship dynamic that ensues was a near-revolutionary depiction of identity, relationships and bisexuality. I think it's important to think about these stories of fluidity that are so rarely written about. Indeed, I've never read a book with this concept, so it was totally unique as a love story. The characters' thought processes as they came to terms with new relationship dynamics, and the reactions of the people around them, felt distinctly real. What disappointed me, without spoiling the plot, was where Rankin-Gee leaned too close into harmful bisexual stereotypes.

It's important to note as well that this isn't just a love story, and the political backdrop (a worryingly plausible UK of the future) added a lot to the feeling of upheaval that was so present in the novel. I do think My Only Boy is a worthwhile read. Although some aspects of the plot disappointed me, the book was deeply affecting and totally compelling.

[Leah Wawro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bold, ambitious and tender. A deeply human book with incredibly real characters. A terrifying close-future near-dystopia- no one wants to see the political or corporate life she imagines. It has twists you could never see coming.

It asks the big questions - what it means to have power, what identity means in a world where identities are under threat, and if love can survive all the mess that surrounds it - but has a plot that tears along. A corporate thriller / political dystopia meets love story.

Witty, smart, sexy - couldn't put it down.

[Karis Jacobs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book even if eerie to read in the midst of the long dry heatwaves in reform country. A tender love story set in a (very!) near future world and far right political backdrop. Writing this review a month after reading and I have such an awful memory so don’t have any specifics to add but I loved it.

[Jasmine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really beautiful