Real Life

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2020 BOOKER PRIZEA NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICEA 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 TóibínWallace 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.'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'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'Psychologically compelling, incisively satirical, told in a muted style that nevertheless accesses a full emotional range, this is a brilliant book, worthy of a wide audience.' Observer'With the rigour of the laboratory, Taylor wields scalpel-like prose, putting human behaviours under the microscope.' Financial Times'Taylor is a masterful observer, his details of everything from a tennis match to sex and dissections both clinically and exquisitely precise.' Telegraph'With its icily cool sentences, mysterious tonal shifts and determinedly open ending, Taylor's novel is a curiously liquid thing, with troubling, opaque depths.' Guardian'An elegant take on the "campus novel" and a deeply moving study of race, grief and desire.' Sunday Times