Real Life

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 AwarenessA 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.