A FINALIST FOR THE 2020 BOOKER PRIZE
A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE
"A blistering coming of age story"-O: The Oprah Magazine
One of the year's most talked about novels, following a young man who runs away to a Midwestern university townonly to fight a deeper psychic battle.
A novel of rare emotional power that excavates the social intricacies of a late-summer weekend-and a lifetime of buried pain. Almost everything about Wallace, an introverted African-American transplant from Alabama, is at odds with the lakeside Midwestern university town where he is working toward a biochem degree. 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 a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with a young straight man, conspire to fracture his defenses, while revealing hidden currents of resentment and desire that threaten the equilibrium of their community.
Real Life is a gut punch of a novel, a story that asks if it's ever really possible to overcome our private wounds and buried histories-and at what cost.

Brandon Taylor is the author of Real Life, which was 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 of the national bestseller Filthy Animals, for which he won The Story Prize and was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Iowa, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in fiction.