Real Life

Long list Ed for the 2020 Booker Prize a new York Times editors Choice a guardian summer reading choice a new kind of campus novel... Taylor endows his narrative with the precision of science and the intimacy of memoir. -- The New Yorker a tender deeply-felt perfectly-paced novel about solitude and society sexuality and race. -- Cole tóibín author of Brooklyn 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 thats a world away from his childhood in Alabama. His father died a few weeks ago but Wallace didnt go back for the funeral and he hasnt 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. Elegant brutal and startlingly intimate real life is a campus novel about learning to live from an electric new voice in fiction. A stunning debut... There is delicacy in the details of working in a lab full of microbes and pipettes that dances across the pages like the feet of a Cunningham dancer: pure precise poetry. -- New York Times This extraordinary debut is a manual for life that I wish I D had sooner. -- naoise dolan author of exciting times extraordinary brilliant claustrophobic tightly wound heart-breaking. I do not have enough words to describe how I loved this book. -- Daisy Johnson author of everything under.