What Belongs to You

'An exquisitely written investigation of desire and shame' Guardian 'A rich, important debut, an instant classic to be savored by all lovers of serious fiction' New York Times Book Review 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. Startlingly erotic and immensely powerful, What Belongs to You tells an unforgettable story about the ways our pasts and cultures, our scars and shames can shape who we are and determine how we love. 'This astonishing debut novel's portrait of compromised lust holds its own against classics like Lolita' Sunday Telegraph 'Greenwell's novel impresses for many reasons, not least of which is how perfectly it fulfils its intentions' James Wood, New Yorker

Garth Greenwell is the author of Cleanness and What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year. His third novel, Small Rain, won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. His critical writing appears widely, and he writes regularly about culture for the Substack newsletter To a Green Thought. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award for prose style from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University.