Brandon Taylor’s debut follows Wallace, a queer Black graduate student working in a biochemistry lab at a predominantly white Midwestern university.

Over one late-summer weekend, the death of his father, the possible sabotage of his research and a charged encounter with a male friend begin to shatter the careful distance through which he has survived both academia and intimacy.

Real Life uses the campus novel to examine academia as a social machine: liberal in language, casually brutal in practice. Taylor is particularly sharp on the exhaustion of having to measure every slight, every exclusion, every apparently innocent remark. His prose is restrained and psychologically close, especially in its treatment of sex, grief and the unstable boundary between tenderness and harm. Shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, it is a strong choice for readers of queer fiction, psychologically exact contemporary novels and books about institutions that mistake intelligence for innocence.

2020 Daunt Books Originals paperback, second printing. Good condition with clean pages, light handling wear and creasing to the upper and lower corners of the front cover.