Bobby MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun—queer, working-class, Scottish artists and lovers—lived defiantly together at a time when homosexuality was a crime. In The Two Roberts, Damian Barr reimagines their relationship from their meeting at the Glasgow School of Art in 1933 until  Colquhoun’s early death in 1962 at the age of 47.

Barr sees MacBryde as an extrovert, but the shy, retiring Colquoun gains more attention because of his arguably greater talent and film star good looks.

Although with their early work, influenced by cubism, they were often indistinguishable, their paintings could later be identified by their subject matter. MacBryde concentrated on still life, while Colquhoun focused on figures. At one point, Colquhoun was being acclaimed by some as Britain’s greatest living painter.

Barr doesn’t just recount their rise and fall; he paints a tender portrait of two men bound as much by devotion as by self-destruction. The novel moves from the industrious commitment of art school to travels through pre-war Europe and the bohemian whirl of Soho and Fitzrovia, capturing both the glamour of their circle—Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon were friends—and the darker undertow of alcohol, poverty, and outsider-hood.

Where the book shines is in its sense of atmosphere. Barr’s prose describes  Britain in the thirties, forties and fifties with a sharp eye for both beauty and decay. His  flights of imagination are not random but are inserted to expose the vulnerability of queer lives lived under threat of law and social exile.

Most engaging, though, is the intensity of the relationship at the centre of the story. Barr makes clear that MacBryde and Colquhoun could neither thrive nor survive without each other, an emotional truth that gives the novel its heart.

Photographed by Vogue, filmed by Ken Russell, and collected by MoMA, the real-life Roberts deserve rediscovery. Barr’s novel—named best fiction of the year by The Guardian, The Observer, and The Herald—does just that, with empathy and respect.