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 inside: 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 tragedy about a boy who was afraid of being seen, and who is finally, in his mother's kitchen on a Wednesday afternoon, seen by the people it most matters to be seen by.

Eighteen in March and he still couldn't drink for shite. Two pints in the Beehive last night with Lloyd Toner, and the body was making him pay at five forty-three in the morning as though he had been on a bender. He sat on the edge of the bed in the dark, the radiator off, his feet cold, the taste of last night's beer at the back of his mouth. His father — who could put six pints down in an evening and operate a circular saw the next morning, no bother — reckoned the ability to drink skipped a generation. Lloyd Toner, who had been eighteen since November and intolerable about it, was good at drinking as well. *Two pints, Hagan*, he had said last night at about the third sip of the second one, *on the side of you a long fucking time*. Half the lads at the gym had had their first sip of Buckfast on the bus to primary school. There was, all in, no excuse for him.