Real Life by: Brandon Taylor

A Finalist for the Booker Prize and named a New York Times Notable Book — this debut novel arrived like a quiet storm and hasn’t stopped resonating since.

O: The Oprah Magazine called it “a blistering coming of age story,” and we’d be hard-pressed to say it better ourselves. It’s the kind of book that gets under your skin in the best possible way.

Wallace is an introverted young Black man from Alabama, working uneasily toward a biochem degree in a Midwestern university town where almost nothing feels like it fits. He’s kept his distance — from his past, from his family, from the friends who surround him. But over a single late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations and an unexpected connection begin to crack open everything he’s worked so hard to protect.

What unfolds is a novel of startling intimacy, quiet violence, and hard-won mercy — a story that asks whether we can ever truly outrun our private wounds, and what it costs us to try.

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, The Guardian, The Paris Review, and many more, this is literary fiction at its most alive and most human.

• Booker Prize Finalist
• New York Times Notable Book
• Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and more

The kind of book you’ll want to press into someone else’s hands the moment you finish. We’ll have it waiting for you on the shelf.

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