"Well, gentlemen…I say it is time for facts to do battle with prejudice." So begins the crusade for justice that the protagonists of Tom Crewe's debut novel, The New Life, hope to embark upon together. Yet this journey is not to be — stymied by the period-typical homophobia of late-19th-century England at every turn, authors John Addington and Henry Ellis find themselves up against a wall. They are forced to face the very real possibility that their lives are on the line because of a book they have co-written. Sexual Inversion, the first English medical textbook on homosexuality, has been published at a time when homosexual acts – vaguely defined as "gross indecency" in legalese – are punishable by up to two years in prison with hard labor. It has also, by complete accident, been published just after famous author and playwright Oscar Wilde's trial (see Beyond the...