Garth Greenwell

A haunting novel of erotic obsession by a major new talent On an unseasonably warm autumn day, an American teacher walks down a stairwell beneath Sofia's National Palace of Culture, looking for sex. Among the stalls of a public bathroom he encounters Mitko, a charismatic young hustler. He returns to Mitko again and again over the next few months, and their trysts grow increasingly intimate and unnerving as the enigma of this young man becomes inseparable from that of his homeland, a country with a difficult past and an uncertain future. What Belongs to You is a stunning debut about an American expat struggling with his own complicated inheritance while navigating a foreign culture. Lyrical and intense, it tells the story of a man caught between longing and resentment, unable to separate desire from danger, and faced with the impossibility of understanding those he most longs to know.

A Novel

What Belongs to You

Winner of the Debut of the Year Award at the British Book Awards. Shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize. 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, Garth Greenwell's 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. Longlisted for the National Book Award in Fiction. A Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. A Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction.

Brianna Hawkins

This novel is a devastating, intimate chronology that reads like a journal. It’s suffocating in the best way as there’s no way to escape the emotions this draws out of you. It’s more about people and circumstance than events, a character study.

𓆨

beautifully written with a good structure and sequence

JoAnna

I adored both What Belongs to You and Cleanness, reading them as extensions of one another. WBTY represents fully the machinations of shame, grief, innocence and jealousy; is brave in its confrontation of emotional roundness—and this honesty brings a startling level of privacy to Greenwell's work. I also love his style: In meandering, measured sentences, Greenwell dilates time, shifting between the present and memory and interiority to propel the emotional narrative forward. I still don't know if I really understand how he does it. He's the kind of writer I want to be.

chris

insane control over his prose, such gloss in the sex scenes; tenderness

Hellboy TCR

This novel has some brilliant writing and a heartbreaking ending which moved me to tears.

Risa C

This was a quiet, deeply introspective novel that felt uncomfortable and claustrophobic, probably intentionally. Greenwell's writing ached with such brutal honesty that the book became difficult to read at times. I admire the language, the stark human truths unearthed in its prose, but I don't think it makes up for a plot that meandered to the point of not going anywhere and the general impatience and lack of sympathy I felt towards an ostensibly privileged, white, American, male protagonist who, I felt, refused any agency or did anything to drive the story, except maybe at the very end. I understand that his backstory informs the reader of why he is the way he is, but I thought that the power dynamic between him and Mitko was still very much tilted in the former's favor, despite his obsession with the latter. Still, there were some soft, quiet moments in the novel that were very memorable.

Amanda Wells

I really came to enjoy this book by the end. I think what sold it for me, was the flashbacks in the main characters life - where you learn about how he learned how to think of himself. 

I felt for much of it as though this was an exercise in extending a thought - a vignette - beyond a short story. But by the end, I really enjoyed it. And I think I began to understand what was being said, and unsaid.

I think I won't know what I think about this book for a while. It felt a little too long, but at times I really enjoyed the pace Greenwell took in examining small things. I don't know that this is a book for everyone, but it certainly got me hooked by the end, and I'll be thinking about it for a while to come.

Charlie Beckerman

Ryan Mateyk

Riel Reyes

On an unseasonably warm autumn day, an American teacher walks down a staircase beneath Sofia's National Palace of Culture, looking for sex. Among the stalls of a public bathroom he encounters Mitko, a charismatic young hustler. He returns to Mitko again and again over the next few months, and their trysts grow increasingly intimate and unnerving as the enigma of this young man becomes inseparable from that of his homeland, Bulgaria, a country with a difficult past and an uncertain future.Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You is a stunning debut about an American expat struggling with his own complicated inheritance while navigating a foreign culture. Lyrical and intense, it tells the story of a man caught between longing and resentment, unable to separate desire from danger, and faced with the impossibility of understanding those he most longs to know.

What Belongs to You A Novel

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