What Belongs to You

What Belongs to You

Garth Greenwell

#1515 of 8,085 books · #754 in Fiction

Shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (2017) and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction (2016).

What Belongs to You won the Debut of the Year Award at the British Book Awards, was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize, longlisted for the National Book Award in Fiction, and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. 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.