Real Life by Brandon Taylor

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 q slur, 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.