Desire – a review

By David Williams

Michael Dakuri’s debut novel Desire (2026), set between Copenhagen and Berlin, feels like one of those rare gay novels that genuinely seem rooted in lived experience. You can tell in the small things. Nights that run too long and blur into morning. Hotel rooms that feel temporary but somehow start to feel familiar in a worrying way. There is a constant push and pull between excitement and exhaustion in both cities.

The story follows Tobias, a beautiful and well-toned young gay man moving through saunas, Pride weekends, parties, and Berlin’s after-hours hotel room scene. He is always around people, often the centre of attention, but there’s a distance there that never really closes. He stays slightly apart, even when he is right in the middle of everything.

Dakuri isn’t really interested in the old coming-out or acceptance narrative; the one instance when it happens is treated almost as a passing detail, because Tobias is already fully immersed in the gay scene. Sex, drugs, attention, desire, it’s all available to him. And that’s exactly what makes the book feel uneasy in a good way. It brings to mind Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band, but flipped. Instead of men looking in from the outside, Tobias is already in the centre of it all. He has access to everything, straddling both the gay and heterosexual worlds with ease, but that’s where the tension sits. Everything is there, but Tobias still wants more.

There’s also something in the novel’s emotional DNA that connects back to Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin. Baldwin wrote about love under pressure, shame, and hiding. Dakuri updates that, but strips out the hiding. Here, the damage comes from exposure rather than secrecy. Tobias carries this constant background awareness and shame around HIV, the emotional weight of casual sex, and a compulsive pull toward pleasure that he doesn’t fully understand or control. It’s not repression. It’s saturation. Too much input, too many bodies, too many encounters, until emotional clarity starts to slip away.

Berlin feels almost like a state of mind in the book. Saunas, hotel rooms, comedowns, it all folds into itself. Copenhagen is different. Cleaner, more ordered on the surface, but somehow colder emotionally. Tobias moves between the two like he’s testing different versions of himself, none of which quite settle.

There are echoes too of Maurice, directed by James Ivory and based on E.M. Forster’s pre-WW1 novel. Both stories are about men trying to find something steady in relationships that also ask them to perform. But where Maurice leans into that softer, almost romantic Edwardian escape, Desire stays firmly grounded in now. Copenhagen and Berlin aren’t romanticised at all. They’re hotel rooms after long nights, stairwells, and those early morning hours where everything feels slightly stripped back and too honest.

People will probably also think of Fire Island, directed by Andrew Ahn, especially in how it maps out gay social hierarchies. Who is desired, who isn’t. Youth, beauty, status, all of that quiet currency running underneath everything. Fire Island handles it with humour and warmth. Desire doesn’t really soften anything.

What Dakuri captures well is the texture of it. The way nights fold into each other. How sex can feel intense and humiliating at the same time, it is enjoyable. Nothing feels exaggerated for effect, which is probably why it lands more than you expect it to.

Mathias, who enters Tobias’s life early in the novel, shifts the tone a bit. At first, he feels grounded, like a possible anchor, someone offering a different pace. But the relationship slowly becomes something looser, less certain, especially after they decide to involve others. Not dramatic, just a gradual drifting where you don’t quite notice you’ve moved off course until you already have.

There are moments where the writing pushes hard in its no-holds-barred description of sexual encounters, but it never tips into falseness. There’s a sincerity underneath it all that holds it together. It understands queer life as a contradiction. Joy and emptiness exist side by side. Connection and distance occur simultaneously.

By the end, what stays with you isn’t the nightlife or the sex or even the chaos of it. It’s something quieter. Tobias is still looking for love, but more than that, he’s trying to find a way of being with people that doesn’t leave him feeling like he’s slowly disappearing.

Desire by Michael Dakuri will be published by Snepryd Publishing and can be purchased via Amazon. 

The book is originally published in Danish under the title "Begær"

Pre-orders and further information are available via the publisher's Instagram https ://www.instagram.com/snepryd_publishing/