In Tongues

Named a Most Anticipated Book by Time, Bloomberg, and Electric Literature

＂Thomas Grattan is a master of plot--that rare ability--which makes In Tongues a real roller coaster: funny, sad, shocking, and, finally, quite moving.＂ --Andrew Holleran, author of Dancer from the Dance

A young gay man upends the lives of a powerful art-world couple in this steamy novel of self-discovery.

It’s 2001, and twenty-four-year-old Gordon--handsome, sensitive, and eager for direction--takes a bus from Minnesota to New York City because it’s the only place for a young gay man to go. As he begins to settle into the city’s punishing rhythm, he gets a job walking rich Manhattanites’ dogs. But it isn’t until he stumbles into the West Village brownstone of two of his clients, the powerful gallery owners Phillip and Nicola, that Gordon learns how much the world has hidden from him--and what he’s capable of doing in order to get it for himself.

A lush, heart-quickening novel about family and art, sex and class, and the terror of self-discovery, Thomas Grattan’s In Tongues chronicles Gordon’s perilous pursuit of belonging from the Midwest to New York and, later, to Europe and Mexico City. As he floats further into Phillip and Nicola’s exclusive universe, and as lines blur between employee, muse, lover, and mentor, Gordon’s charm, manipulation, and growing ambition begin to escape his own control, in turn threatening to unravel the lives, and lies, of those around him.

Anchored by winsome lyricism, glinting intellect, and a main character whose yearnings and mistakes come to feel like our own, In Tongues crackles with fierce longing and pointed emotion, further confirming Grattan as a rare chronicler of young adulthood’s joys and devastations.

Thomas Grattan is the author of The Recent East, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, was long-listed for the 2021 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, and was named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. His writing has appeared in several publications, including The New York Times Book Review, One Story, Slice, and Colorado Review. He has an MFA in fiction writing from Brooklyn College and has taught middle-school English for more than a decade. He lives in upstate New York.