Books & Spoken Word
Novel Writer: Brandon Taylor introduces his new novel
As part of the Novel Writers series, Brandon Taylor will be introducing his debut novel Real Life.
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2020, Real Life is a breathtakingly intimate exploration of queer black masculinity, loneliness, violence, desire and more.
In the novel, Wallace 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.
is needed now More than ever