SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2020 BOOKER PRIZE

A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE

A GUARDIAN SUMMER READING CHOICE

'A new kind of campus novel . . . Taylor endows his narrative with the precision of science and the intimacy of memoir.' -- The New Yorker

'A tender, deeply-felt, perfectly-paced novel about solitude and society, sexuality and race.' -- Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn

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.

Elegant, brutal and startlingly intimate, Real Life is a campus novel about learning to live from an electric new voice in fiction.

'A stunning debut . . . There is delicacy in the details of working in a lab full of microbes and pipettes that dances across the pages like the feet of a Cunningham dancer: pure, precise poetry.' -- New York Times

'This extraordinary debut is a manual for life that I wish I d had sooner.' -- Naoise Dolan, author of Exciting Times

'Extraordinary, brilliant, claustrophobic, tightly wound, heartbreaking. I do not have enough words to describe how I loved this book.' -- Daisy Johnson, author of Everything Under