Real Life

'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 TimesWallace 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.A campus novel imagined from the vantage of a character who is usually shunted to the sidelines . . . [Taylor] endows his narrative with the precision of science and the intimacy of memoir.' -- The New Yorker'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