Real Life

An elegant, brutal and startlingly intimate novel from an electric new voice.

Wallace has spent his summer in the lab breeding a strain of microscopic worms. He is four years into a biochemistry degree at a lakeside Midwestern university, a life that’s a world away from his childhood in Alabama. His father died a few weeks ago, but Wallace didn’t go back for the funeral, and he hasn’t told his friends – Miller, Yngve, Cole and Emma. For reasons of self-preservation, he has become used to keeping a wary distance even from those closest to him. But, over the course of one blustery end-of-summer weekend, the destruction of his work and a series of intense confrontations force Wallace to grapple with both the trauma of the past, and the question of the future.

Deftly zooming in and out of focus, Real Life is a deeply affecting story about the emotional cost of reckoning with desire, and overcoming pain.

‘Astonishingly accomplished . . . Brandon Taylor has written a truly exquisite story of love, sex, death, and microbes that is both intimate and expansive.’ – Times Literary Supplement

‘Unquestionably the queer novel of the year . . . An essential novel from a truly exciting new writer.’ – Irish Times