Real Life : Shortlisted for the Booker Prize

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2020 BOOKER PRIZEFOYLES FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2020Wallace 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.‘Psychologically compelling, incisively satirical, told in a muted style that nevertheless accesses a full emotional range, this is a brilliant book, worthy of a wide audience.’ – Observer‘Real Life is a campus novel in the tradition of Sally Rooney and Ben Lerner, and Taylor is as good as either of them – a sharp, witty and generous writer.’ – Literary Review‘An elegant take on the “campus novel” and a deeply moving study of race, grief and desire.’ – Sunday Times‘With the rigour of the laboratory, Taylor wields scalpel-like prose, putting human behaviours under the microscope . . . Precise and masterly.’ – Financial Times ‘The prose is exact and clear; Taylor has a keen sensitivity for surface detail.’ – The Times‘With its icily cool sentences, mysterious tonal shifts and determinedly open ending, Taylor’s novel is a curiously liquid thing, with troubling, opaque depths.’ – Guardian‘Taylor is a masterful observer, his details of everything from a tennis match to sex and dissections both clinically and exquisitely precise.’ – Telegraph‘Stunningly executed . . . As in the modernist novels of Woolf, Real Life is formally ambitious and densely suggestive: worlds exist beneath the surface, violently shifting against one another.’ – Sydney Morning Herald‘A new kind of campus novel . . . Taylor endows his narrative with the precision of science and the intimacy of memoir.’ – The New Yorker