Long list Ed for the 2020 Booker Prize a new York Times editors' Choice a guardian summer reading choice 'a new kind of campus novel... Taylor endows his narrative with the precision of science and the intimacy of memoir.' -- The New Yorker 'a tender, deeply-felt, perfectly-paced novel about solitude and society, sexuality and race.' -- Cole tóibín, author of Brooklyn Wallace has spent his summer in the lab breeding a strain of microscopic worms. He is four years into a biochemistry degree at a lakeside Midwestern University, a life that's a world away from his childhood in Alabama. His father died a few weeks ago, but Wallace didn't go back for the funeral, 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. But, over the course of one blustery end-of-summer weekend, the destruction of his work and a series of intense confrontations force Wallace to grapple with both 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. 'A stunning debut... There is delicacy in the details of working in a lab full of microbes and pipettes that dances across the pages like the feet of a Cunningham dancer: pure, precise poetry.' -- New York Times 'This extraordinary debut is a manual for life that I wish I br>D had sooner.' -- naoise dolan, author of exciting times 'extraordinary, brilliant, claustrophobic, tightly wound, heart-breaking. I do not have enough words to describe how I loved this book.' -- Daisy Johnson, author of everything under.