Real Life: SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2020 BOOKER PRIZE: Brandon Taylor - Softcover

Brandon Taylor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1911547747 ISBN 13: 9781911547747

Publisher: Daunt Books, 2020

Synopsis

SHORTLISTED 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.' -- Colm 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 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.

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, heartbreaking. I do not have enough words to describe how I loved this book.' -- Daisy Johnson, author of Everything Under

About this title

About the Author

Brandon Taylor is the author of the acclaimed novel Real Life, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and the Foyles Fiction Book of the Year. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow in fiction.

From the Back Cover

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Daunt Books
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1911547747
• ISBN 13: 9781911547747
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336