'On The Move' book review: an intimate tribute to an unusual man by his lover

An intimate tribute to a most unusual man by his devoted lover, writes Kate Sidley

In the memoir On The Move, published shortly before he died in 2015, neurologist and author Oliver Sacks wrote about his personal life for the first time.

He revealed that he was gay, and that after 35 years of celibacy, he had fallen in love. Bill Hayes, Sacks's lover and partner, has now written an intimate tribute to Sacks, to New York City, and to love itself - Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me.

Devastated by the death of his long-term partner from sudden cardiac arrest, Hayes left San Francisco for New York. He had met Sacks after a correspondence over Sacks's book and, now in the same city, they became friends.

Hayes writes: ''He was without a doubt the most unusual person I had ever known, and before long I found myself not just falling in love with O; it was something more, something I had never experienced before. I adored him."

There is much to adore in Sacks. His cheerfulness, his extraordinary brain with its many deep interests - the elements, classical music - his eccentricities, his dislocation from the modern world (he refers to Hayes' iPhone as a "communicator"), and his oddly formal speech. "Take heed of the ferns!" Sacks tells Hayes, who teases him: ''Take heed? Who talks like that? Queen Victoria?"

The book is composed of stories and fragments. There are tender vignettes of the couple - getting giggly-stoned together on weed, going up to the apartment roof of an evening to look at the clouds, cooking supper, chatting in the bath - and captured snippets of conversations and notes from Hayes's journal: "In bed, O reads to me from Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle ..."

The learning isn't one-way. Hayes shows the unworldly older man how to open a champagne bottle. Sacks, who insists on wearing swimming goggles, just in case, is delighted by the pop.

Sacks was a renowned chronicler of his patients and their lives, but Hayes is himself a wonderful observer. He not only sees but feels the beauty and heartbreak of the world and its inhabitants. In his insomnia and curiosity, he walks the city and encounters New Yorkers - shopkeepers, subway passengers, addicts, cabbies, kids hanging out at the skate park.

The brief connections, the eavesdropped conversations and impressionistic observations are intimate little slices of life, as are Hayes's black and white photographs of the city and its people.

But the book is at heart an unusual love story. Sacks was 30 years Hayes's senior, in his late 70s when they fell in love and in his 80s when he died. Very hard of hearing, almost blind, he had excruciating sciatica and a dodgy knee.

 Reticent and introverted, he struggled to make a romantic and sexual connection. And yet in his last decade, and in his illness and fragility, he was well loved and tended, and he loved in return.

Sacks says to Hayes: "I am glad to be on planet Earth with you. It would be much lonelier otherwise." This sort of thing might sound cloying, and there are moments, but the book is for the most part a delight, poignant and funny and touching on the important things - love and loss and companionship and illness and death and sunsets and the periodic table and the joy of swimming.

Shortly before he died, Sacks told Hayes, ''The most we can do is to write - intelligently, creatively, critically, evocatively - about what it is like living in the world at this time." With this soulful memoir, Hayes has done just that.

• This article was originally published in The Times.