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Real Life by Brandon Taylor

Real Life by Brandon Taylor

£9.99Price

Limited SIGNED COPIES 

 

Wallace 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.

 

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‘This debut is a fresh take on the age-old ‘campus novel’ tradition, providing a deeply painful, nuanced account of microaggressions, abuse, racism, homophobia, trauma, grief and alienation.  We admired the vivid ways the book evokes daily, repetitive action as well as memory and fantasy to get at its profound central question: what is ‘real life’ anyway?’ – Booker Prize judges

 

‘With its icily cool sentences, mysterious tonal shifts and determinedly open ending, Taylor’s novel is also a curiously liquid thing, with troubling, opaque depths.’ –  Guardian

 

Real Life is a tender, deeply-felt, perfectly-paced novel about solitude and society, sexuality and race. It explores what the past means and, with brilliance and sympathy, dramatizes the intricacies of love and grief.’ – Colm Tóibín

 

Real Life beautifully dissects themes of loss, rejection, sexual violence and racism with forensic, but compassionate insight.’ – Uli Lenart, Attitude Magazine

  • Details

    Imprint: Daunt Books

    Publication Date: 30 July 2020

    ISBN: 9781911547747

    Type: Paperback 

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EU and Northern Irish customers: We are sorry to say that, due to the new GPSR rules and regulations for EU shipping, we will not be able to ship to the EU or Northern Ireland for the foreseeable future.

Non-EU customers: Shipments to countries outside of the European Union will not be affected, but you may still incur customs charges. Please check your local import rules and regulations.

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