Real Life cover art

Real Life

A Novel

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Real Life

By: Brandon Taylor
Narrated by: Kevin R. Free
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About this listen

 A FINALIST for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the VCU/Cabell First Novelist Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the NYPL Young Lions Award, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award

“A blistering coming of age story” —O: The Oprah Magazine

Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York Public Library, Vanity Fair, Elle, NPR, The Guardian, The Paris Review, Harper's Bazaar, Financial Times, Huffington Post, BBC, Shondaland, Barnes & Noble, Vulture, Thrillist, Vice, Self, Electric Literature, and Shelf Awareness

A novel of startling intimacy, violence, and mercy among friends in a Midwestern university town, from an electric new voice.
Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends—some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community.

Real Life is a novel of profound and lacerating power, a story that asks if it’s ever really possible to overcome our private wounds, and at what cost. African American Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Fiction Inspiring
All stars
Most relevant
I really liked this book. It captures a feeling and experience all too familiar to me in a way that is poetic, powerful and highly original. Sometimes reading about other peoples mental turmoil makes it so you feel less alone and less wrong in your own.

The voice actor is brilliant. They get the story so the characters are really brought to life. It makes listening to this story even more exceptional. 10/10.

Brilliant storytelling accompanied by an equally talented voice actor

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Writing was gorgeously poetic and I think the narrator did it justice. The perspective on the world is a bleak one, so not one for a muggy, rainy week in isolation...

Beautiful but bleak

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This is probably important for young gay men but it is meant to be a story not just a series of vague descriptions and suppositions.

Just boring

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An EXTREMELY dull book with no real storyline. As it’s so short I persisted, waiting for something to happen ..... but it didn’t.
The Author tries to add shock value and interest by including an abusive background story for main character and homosexuality, but the events are so unrelated the narrative just becomes confusing & unpalatable.

Extremely DULL!!

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In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.