Real Life by Brandon Taylor

Wallace has spent his summer in the lab breeding a strain of microscopic worms for an experiment, a slow and painstaking process. He is four years into a biochemistry degree at a lakeside Midwestern university, a life that's a world away from his childhood growing up in Alabama. His father died a few weeks ago, but Wallace has not been home, 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. Over the course of one blustery end-of-summer weekend, a catastrophic mishap and a series of intense confrontations force Wallace to grapple with intimacy, desire, 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.