The Late Americans

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER

NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR BY VOGUE, ELLE, OPRAH DAILY, THE WASHINGTON POST, BUZZFEED AND VULTURE

＂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

The Booker Prize finalist and widely acclaimed author of Real Life and 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. Among them are Seamus, a frustrated young poet; Ivan, a dancer turned aspiring banker who dabbles in amateur pornography; Fatima, whose independence and work ethic complicate 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 four are buffeted by a cast of artists, landlords, meatpacking workers, and mathematicians who populate the cafes, classrooms, and food-service kitchens of the 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 friendship and chosen family, The Late Americans asks fresh questions about love and sex, ambition and precarity, and about how human beings can bruise one another while trying to find themselves. It 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.

Brandon Taylor is the author of Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel 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.