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Seen: A West Belfast Story
Liam Hagan was an amateur boxer at a community gym off the Falls Road in West Belfast when the new lad walked in.
The new lad was Kostia Tkachenko — Ukrainian, in Belfast since the war. What happened between them across the months that followed was the most private thing in Liam's life.
A boxer's hand on a wrist correcting a stance. Two pairs of hands at the bench at the end of a session, wrapping and unwrapping. A sleeping bag on the floor of a box room and two boys three feet apart, breathing into the dark.
Liam had never been able to imagine that the place he lived would not destroy him for who he was. He had been preparing for that destruction for as long as he could remember. He did not yet know what the preparation would cost him.
Seen is a novel about a closet built from the about the small private violences a closeted boy does to himself, the larger ones he does to the person he is trying to love, and the slow, attentive, almost subliminal kindness of a city that has been catching its gay sons for longer than the boys themselves have known. It is a coming-of-age story about a boy who was afraid of being seen, and who is finally, seen by the people it most matters to be seen by.
For readers of Douglas Stuart's Young Mungo, Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, and Colm Tóibín's The Blackwater Lightship.
The new lad was Kostia Tkachenko — Ukrainian, in Belfast since the war. What happened between them across the months that followed was the most private thing in Liam's life.
A boxer's hand on a wrist correcting a stance. Two pairs of hands at the bench at the end of a session, wrapping and unwrapping. A sleeping bag on the floor of a box room and two boys three feet apart, breathing into the dark.
Liam had never been able to imagine that the place he lived would not destroy him for who he was. He had been preparing for that destruction for as long as he could remember. He did not yet know what the preparation would cost him.
Seen is a novel about a closet built from the about the small private violences a closeted boy does to himself, the larger ones he does to the person he is trying to love, and the slow, attentive, almost subliminal kindness of a city that has been catching its gay sons for longer than the boys themselves have known. It is a coming-of-age story about a boy who was afraid of being seen, and who is finally, seen by the people it most matters to be seen by.
For readers of Douglas Stuart's Young Mungo, Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, and Colm Tóibín's The Blackwater Lightship.
258 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 21, 2026
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