Real Life
Wallace is a Black biochemistry PhD student at a predominantly white university in the rural Midwest, the only Black person in his cohort, and the son of a father who has just died and a childhood he has never told anyone about. Over the course of a single late-summer weekend, a sabotaged nematode culture, a rumor in the lab, a hostile dinner with friends who consider themselves allies, and a volatile encounter with a straight-identifying classmate named Miller force Wallace to stop managing other people's comfort. Brandon Taylor's 2020 debut, a Booker Prize finalist, is a campus novel in the most literal sense, moving from bench to lake to apartment, and it treats friendship, desire, and institutional racism with the same clinical patience Wallace brings to his worms.
Where Real Life keeps showing up
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Books in conversation with Real Life
A few of the closest reads from our full list.
What you might want to know about Real Life
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Wallace, a Black gay biochemistry PhD student from Alabama, has just lost his sabotaged nematode samples. Over one late-summer weekend at his Midwestern grad school, his friend group quietly cracks open.
Yes. Real Life is a literary novel set over a single weekend on a Midwestern college campus, focused on a Black queer biochemistry PhD student. It was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize.
No. Real Life is a standalone, but Brandon Taylor has written related fiction (the story collection Filthy Animals and the novels The Late Americans and Minor Black Figures) in similar literary territory.
Real Life was written by Brandon Taylor, published in 2020 by Riverhead Books.
Real Life is 336 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Real Life takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
Real Life is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
