Description Shipping & Returns Reviews Description SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2020 BOOKER PRIZE. A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE. A GUARDIAN SUMMER READING CHOICE 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. ‘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 Tibn, author of Brooklyn. Shipping & Returns Reviews