Garth Greenwell reads What Belongs To You
Garth Greenwell's debut novel has received rave reviews from both sides of the Atlantic. Garth kindly dropped by to read to us from What Belongs To You.
Garth Greenwell's debut novel has received rave reviews from both sides of the Atlantic. Garth kindly dropped by to read to us from What Belongs To You.
Garth shares the writers, musicians and places he finds himself returning to:
'A rich, important debut, an instant classic to be savoured by all lovers of serious fiction' - The New York Times Book Review
'Language as beautiful and vivid as poetry'- Hanya Yanagihara
'An uncommonly sensitive, intelligent and poignant novel' - Sunday Times
'Erotic holding, emotional withholding and the question of who holds power in a relationship are all examined in a work which gripped me all the way to its sad and beautiful ending' - Independent on Sunday
What Belongs to You
by Garth Greenwell
On an unseasonably warm autumn day, an American teacher enters a public bathroom beneath Sofia's National Palace of Culture. There he meets Mitko, a charismatic young hustler, and pays him for sex. He returns to Mitko again and again over the next few months, their relationship growing increasingly intimate and unnerving.
As he struggles to reconcile his longing with the anguish it creates, he's forced to grapple with his own fraught history: his formative experiences of love, his painful rejection by family and friends, and the difficulty of growing up as a gay man in southern America in the 1990s.
Read an interview with Garth Greenwell in literary magazine Aerodrome