At Swim, Two Boys / Jamie O'Neill

At Swim, Two Boys is a 2001 novel written by Irish author Jamie O'Neill. The novel employs stream-of-consciousness, and so it will be difficult to read until you have adapted to the style.

Plot
The novel takes place in Dublin just before and during the Easter Rebellion of 1916. It focuses on two young men, Jim Mack and Doyler Doyler, and their budding relationships: with each other, with their families, with a slightly older man named MacMurrough, and with the growing revolt against British rule.

Relevance
At Swim, Two Boys is often advertised as a love story between Jim and Doyler, but it's much, much more than that. In fact, the relationship takes most of the book to come to fruition, and large chunks of the text are spent with satellite characters, like MacMurrough, Jim's father, and MacMurrough's aunt. The point of this book is not the gay love affair: it's the inevitable Easter Rising, it's the class struggle, it's everything going on around the romance. As such, this isn't the book to read if you want nothing more than a bit of romance. That said, however, Jim does struggle with his sexuality vis-à-vis his Catholic religion, and so the relevance to GLBT audiences is not limited strictly to his budding relationship with Doyler. Again, though, this is not the primary focus of the book, and once Jim resolves his struggle, the book continues on for quite a while.