A FINALIST for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the VCU/Cabell First Novelist Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the NYPL Young Lions Award, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award
“A blistering coming of age story” —
O: The Oprah Magazine
Named a Best Book of the Year by
The New York Times
,
The Washington Post
, New York Public Library,
Vanity Fair, Elle
, NPR,
The Guardian
The Paris Review, Harper's Bazaar
Financial Times
, Huffington Post, BBC, Shondaland, Barnes & Noble,
Vulture
Thrillist
Vice
Self
, Electric Literature, and Shelf Awareness
A novel of startling intimacy, violence, and mercy among friends in a Midwestern university town, from an electric new voice.
Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends—some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community.
Real Life
is a novel of profound and lacerating power, a story that asks if it’s ever really possible to overcome our private wounds, and at what cost.