The Late Americans

NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR BY ELLE AND VULTURE

The author of the Booker Prize finalist Real Life and the bestselling Filthy Animals returns with a deeply involving new novel of young men and women at a crossroads

In the shared and private spaces of Iowa City, a loose circle of lovers and friends encounter, confront, and provoke one another in a volatile year of self-discovery. At the group's center are Ivan, a dancer turned aspiring banker who dabbles in amateur pornography; Fatima, whose independence and work ethic complicates her relationships with friends and a trusted mentor; and Noah, who "didn't seek sex out so much as it came up to him like an anxious dog in need of affection." These three are buffeted by a cast of poets, artists, landlords, meat-packing workers, and mathematicians who populate the cafes, classrooms, and food-service kitchens of Iowa City, sometimes to violent and electrifying consequence. Finally, as each prepares for an uncertain future, the group heads to a cabin to bid goodbye to their former lives — a moment of reckoning that leaves each of them irrevocably altered.

A novel of intimacy and precarity, friendship and chosen family, The Late Americans is Brandon Taylor's richest and most involving work of fiction to date, confirming his position as one of our most perceptive chroniclers of contemporary life.

"Erudite, intimate, hilarious, poignant...A gorgeously written novel of youth's promise, of the quest to find one's tribe and one's calling." Leigh Haber, Oprah Daily

"[An] intense, finely tuned book. Taylor is an inimitable talent." Elle

"Provocative...Through Taylor's signature intimacy, we see casual emotional devastation, prickly social interactions, and wry humor with keen clarity." Vulture

"Brandon Taylor writes with such precision and perception that reading his work is an immersive experience: you inhabit his characters, you share their nerve endings. The Late Americans is a brilliant and electrifying symphony of a novel. I loved it." Lily King, author of Writers & Lovers and Euphoria

Brandon Taylor is the author of Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize and named a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, and of the national bestseller Filthy Animals, for which he won The Story Prize and was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Iowa, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in fiction.