Double Booked
by Lily Lindon
Bloomsbury Publishing
Twenty-six year-old Georgina has a stable, ordered, balanced life with her boyfriend of seven years, Douglas. Thanks to a shared a digital calendar, they can schedule dates when Gina is not teaching inept children how the play the piano.
One night, Gina breaks her routine to go to a gay bar with her friend Steph to watch an indie lesbian pop band called Phase perform. She is mesmerised by the band and one of the band members – the tall, toned, androgynous Kit whose smouldering eyes, rimmed with rock-star kohl, were staring at her.
Gina begins to think that she is only living half a life; that she would like to be just like the women on stage and also that she might not be exclusively attracted to men. The stars align when the keyboard player leaves the band and Gina’s alter ego George auditions to be in the band.
As a Libra, she has always found it difficult to make decisions, and so she splits her life in two. She doesn’t want to lose her happy straight life but she loves the sense of belonging in the gay scene. So, now Gina is heading towards marrying her long-term boyfriend while George has joined a cult lesbian pop band.
With a change of clothes, a versatile hair cut and painstaking scheduling, she divides her life and lives as Gina by day and George by night. The Libra scales keep going up and down as she weighs the possibilities and wonders which parallel universe will make her the happiest.
Her clandestine life actually spurs her get more out of her teaching and her relationship with her boyfriend, but living the double life was never going to be her life-solution. She has to work out the difference between what she thinks she is meant to want and start living like she actually wants to.
Double Booked is a bumpy ride of self-discovery that joyously celebrates many of life’s possibilities and it is a great first-time offering from Lily Lindon who admits to writing it in a doomed attempt to stay sane during lockdown.
Lezly Herbert
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