If you could save someone's life, would you? Anyone's? Ali's older brother has a swastika tattooed on his knuckles, a prison ID number for nearly beating an immigrant to death, and spent his teenage years ruthlessly persecuting Ali for being gay. Blood may be thicker than water, but Ali has spent most of his life desperate to prove he is nothing like Tony. A committed vegetarian, charity-supporter, and blood donor, Ali would do anything for anyone. Ali may share parentage with Tony, but he’s determined not to share anything else if he can help it. So when Tony contracts leukaemia, and Ali is the only match for the urgently-needed bone marrow transplant, Ali is caught between two equally awful choices: to refuse and condemn a man to death, or to donate. And in donating, save the life of the man who nearly murdered Ali's Iraqi boyfriend?

Thicker Than Bone

“Why are you so sappy?” Yazid asked.


“What do you say,” Ali whispered, tracking his lips in little kisses up the side of Yazid’s face, “that we stay in, get the takeaway of your choice, say fuck your healthy regime for once, and pretend for one night that it’s just us, and it’s been six easy years, and cancer doesn’t exist. Just you and me and a clothes ban.”


Yazid laughed, and pushed Ali off to slide sideways onto the mattress. “You’re already halfway to a clothes ban,” he said, and heaved himself up off the bed. He was still leaner than Ali strictly liked, his skin still oddly naked from the way he’d lost all his body hair through the chemotherapy and it had grown back in—unlike his head hair—thinner than before. But he was finally better, and to Ali he’d never looked more beautiful.


Chapter 3